


Under Orders

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-06
Updated: 2010-04-06
Packaged: 2017-10-08 18:04:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-VIII, AU spinning off the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQDQ2EbnK1E">shot but unused ending to Only the Good...</a> in which the ship is saved, the boyz plus Kris are on the Dwarf, and Rimmer's still just been KOed by the vending machine. When five out of six of the last remaining entities in the universe are male and only one's female, something's gotta give. I haven't gotten any better at summaries since I started writing fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Red Dwarf characters belong to Grant Naylor Productions and the BBC. This may change if I ever win Tattslotto.
> 
> Mad props to Bitsy for beta/concrit on the first iteration of this. To paraphrase Stephen King, for what's still shit, blame me. N.B. The violence isn't _that_ graphic but I thought better safe than sorry; it sure ain't as graphic as the sex.
> 
> Dedicated to Bitsy and Caz.

Rimmer hits the deck with a _thunk_ that Kochanski, even in her rapidly advancing state of inebriation, can’t miss. She breaks away from Lister and Cat and runs – well, shambles relatively quickly – back down the corridor, pinpointing Rimmer’s location by the sound of the vending machine laughing.

He’s out cold, a lump the size of a chicken’s egg – god, she could murder a bacon and egg butty right now – already throbbing on the back of his head, and she yells for Kryten instinctively while parting his hair to look for bleeding. There isn’t any, just that ugly raised welt, and suddenly fear grips her because there’s only one real reason she can think of for a head wound _not_ to bleed.

But he does have a pulse when she checks; it’s just thready, and so maybe he’s just gotten lucky and the can didn’t break his skin.

Kryten skids around the corner. ‘What’s wrong, ma’am?’ His eyes go wide. ‘Is he d-d-d—’

‘He’s fine. Can you get him to the medi-bay? I’ll be there in a minute.’ Kochanski picks up the can and eyes the vending machine speculatively. ‘I just have something to do first.’

 

Fifteen minutes later the vending machine has been demoted to a fizzling heap of broken circuits, and she’s sitting beside Rimmer’s bed in the medi-bay, holding an ice pack to the back of his head and watching the cotton wad up his nose for any further sign of bleeding. He’s lucky it isn’t broken, really.

‘He’ll be fine, leave him alone,’ Lister says from the doorway, holding out her abandoned bottle.

‘Can’t, Dave, he might have a concussion and it’s too risky.’

‘Kryten can watch him.’

‘Kryten’s a bit busy helping Holly steer this crate while you two hoppety-skip around the place.’

Lister almost looks annoyed, except that he so rarely looks annoyed that the expression doesn’t quite work and comes out as a puppyish befuddlement instead. ‘You were out there too,’ he unnecessarily reminds her.

Kochanski sighs and pushes her hair out of her eyes. ‘I just want to be sure my crew are safe.’

‘Are you – you’re not pullin’ rank on me, are you? Over _him_?’

‘He did save our lives. Sort of. We did need to confirm what the compound was before we could use it.’ She raises an eyebrow at him. ‘I didn’t know you knew anything about chemistry.’

‘I don’t, I was just windin’ him up,’ Lister admits shamelessly.

‘I see.’

Cat’s head pops up over Lister’s shoulder. ‘Hey, Bud-babe, what’s happening in here? The party misses you!’

The party consists of two drunk men without her, so she has no doubt that it does. ‘The vending machine attacked Rimmer.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ She checks the ice pack, shifts it around so a cooler spot is against the bump. At least his nose isn’t bleeding any more. ‘Can you two go away? _Please_?’

‘Okay.’ Lister makes the two syllables sound like an extended whine, but at least the two of them finally go away, which is doubly a relief because it’s right about then that Rimmer starts coming to.

‘Owww...’

‘Stay still,’ Kochanski says quickly.

‘...‘kay. Don’t eat me.’

Great. He’s clearly lost no higher mental functions, then. ‘I’m not going to eat you.’

‘Nice bear,’ Rimmer mumbles before his mouth relaxes and it becomes apparent that he’s fallen asleep. Kochanski debates waking him back up, keeping him talking, but his breathing is even and – she wraps her fingers around his wrist, checking – his pulse is even as well.

Maybe leaving the other ships behind was a mistake. Maybe she should order Kryten to stop the _Dwarf_, to allow the fleet of ship to surface vehicles trailing behind them to catch up and reboard. What if the next time someone gets hurt it’s more than a bump on the head? They need medical personnel, they need—

They don’t need _anyone_. They’ve survived this far alone, and she’s not just thinking of the last twenty-four hours. She’s thinking of all the years since she first stepped out of stasis. Sure, these guys aren’t her crew, but they’re _a_ crew, and somewhere inside them all is the same potential her crew had. In fact, Rimmer’s the only wild card; she hasn’t had years to get to know him the way she knows, or thinks she knows, the other three.

She runs through what she does know about him, his pulse still beating under her fingers as she stares into space – or rather, stares at the lowest line on the eye chart on the medi-bay wall. He’s Lister’s bunkmate. He’s incredibly egotistic and self-centred. He’s not afraid to stoop to seriously low levels to save his own arse. He’s got a crush on her. He can be boring as hell but without his ability to memorise pointless minutiae maybe they wouldn’t have confirmed the name of the compound. He’s got  a rather misplaced sense of ambition considering that over the past however many years it’s been he’s only been promoted once... but he hasn’t let it stop him doggedly trying over and over and over.

She releases his wrist, blinks at the eye chart. It’s got to be beer goggles telling her that the bottom line says R I M M E R one moment and L I S T E R the next. _What_. She’s not in any kind of mood to think about this; in fact, given the events of the day, she’s more in a mood to go crawl into her bunk (especially since she can now have her very own bunk back again, in her own room, with her own _clean_ sheets). But she can’t very well leave Rimmer on his own if he’s concussed. God only knows what he might get up to if he came to and still thought he was being attacked by bears, or whatever it was.

So she settles into the chair beside his bed, curling up as small as she can manage, her head distantly beginning to pound already, puts her arms around her knees and her chin on them, and vows to remain alert.

Five minutes later she’s asleep.

* * *

The polar bear isn’t just licking the back of his head any more, it’s slobbering right down his neck, clearly attempting to marinade him in dribble before it bites down. The back of his head hurts so much that he’s not sure that the bear didn’t already take a bite. Rimmer flails and the ice pack goes flying.

‘Augh!’

Rimmer struggles his eyelids open and blinks sideways. Strange, that didn’t _sound_ like a polar bear. He sees Kochanski picking the ice pack out of her lap, grimacing.

‘You’re not a polar bear,’ he says.

Kochanski looks at him and rolls her eyes. She even rolls her eyes in an officerish way, a genteel _oh-my-goodness-no_ sort of way instead of Lister’s _don’t-be-a-smeggin’-idiot_ way. ‘Is that what you thought? Lie back down,’ she adds, ‘I’ll get a fresh ice pack.’

Rimmer puts his head back down in the same awkward sideways position that avoids putting any pressure on either his sore nose or his throbbing skull. It’s difficult because pretty much his whole head aches as a result of the two pains gestalting into one big ball of agony in the middle.

Then she comes back with the new ice pack and a new, dry towel to wrap around it, and when she holds it against his head it’s like a tiny tiny island of relief in an ocean of pain.

‘You’re an angel,’ he mumbles, eyes closing again; he wishes his ears would close as well so he couldn’t hear her laugh at him.

The darkness is red and blotchy and at the back of his head it’s cold. He feels her hand at his wrist, fingers efficiently pressed against the pulse point there. She’s lost the little calluses she used to have from hammering away at a keyboard every shift for hours on end. He only knows she used to have them because Lister mentioned them in the context of the nine thousand minutiae about her that he was going to miss; Rimmer had tried to block the litany out but Lister was impossible to ignore.

Her skin is smooth. The hands of a healer.

He’s still not quite sure what happened to him but he’s pretty sure he’s not quite thinking straight. She’s being nice to him but that means nothing; she probably just doesn’t want to have to explain leaving him to die if the flotilla of ships behind them ever catch up. Although if they do he might be better off that way; he remembers the arrogant little salute he shot to Hollister and winces.

‘Did I hurt you?’

‘No. Just thinking.’ His voice is fuzzy too but not like a polar bear, more like a hibernating grizzly. He wishes he’d never started thinking about bloody polar bears in the first place.

She laughs again. ‘That would have to hurt at the moment.’ He wants to formulate an indignant retort and she takes her hand off his wrist and puts it on his shoulder instead, making him stay put instead of attempting to lift his head, which is nice of her because it still hurts like hell to move. ‘Settle down, I’m only joking.’

‘Ha,’ says Rimmer, and then after a sufficiently petite silence, ‘ha,’ just to prove his point, which was... he _thinks_ it was that she wasn’t funny, anyway.

‘Hush.’ She pulls back altogether, and it sounds like she settles back into the chair beside the bed. ‘If that ice pack goes damp on you again, try not to throw it at me, okay?’

‘Don’t leave me,’ Rimmer says hastily.

‘I’m not going to. I’ll be right here. Just get some rest.’ She sounds exhausted and for the first time Rimmer wonders how long he’s been out for. It can’t have been too long, or his head would be in less pain, he thinks. Then his brain informs him it’s had enough of thinking, thanks, and would like to go back to sleep now, and he slips back into sleep without another conscious thought.

* * *

When she wakes up again she’s slumped over with her head on the pillow beside his; a vague memory of leaning over to check his breathing surfaces as she slowly sits up and pushes her hair out of her face. All the lines of aggression and petulance go out of his face when he’s asleep, she notes; it’s all she has time _to_ note before a bolt of pain smacks her across the temples. Fortunately she’s in the right place to find a hangover cure; a few minutes of half-blind digging through cupboards nets her an ampoule of a particular concoction that CMO Newton doesn’t usually pass out willy-nilly, and thanks to the ezi-ject hypo she’s dosed up within seconds.

A familiar metallic clanging announces Kryten’s arrival. ‘Everything all right in here, ma’am?’

‘He’s fine, he’s sleeping it off.’ She removes the now tepid ice pack and replaces it with another; Rimmer barely moves, sleeping a natural sleep now and not a Coke can induced one. ‘What about Dave and Cat?’

‘Passed out in the Captain’s quarters.’

‘What, together?’

A moue of distaste crosses Kryten’s lips. ‘He misses you very much, ma’am, but not _that_ much.’

Kochanski sighs and shakes her head; it still hurts, so the hangover cure hasn’t entirely kicked in yet. ‘Can you manage up here for a bit? There’s something I want to do.’

‘Certainly, ma’am.’

Kochanski doesn’t ask why he’s dropped back into subservient mode. They’re all out of place here; she’s no medical officer, he’s no pilot, and she sort of misses being told where to be and when herself. Not enough to want to go back to the Brig, though, and with what they’ve done they’re looking at thirty years minimum.

She leaves him alone, hurries up to the Captain’s office to pick up a spare access key and then to the bank of lifts behind the Drive Room. She’d just as soon not go through the ducts or down the long way via the landing bay for this. She turns the key, pushes the button for Floor 13, and seconds later is whizzing down to their former prison.

She’s going to have to establish a pecking order here. The fug of the alcohol has worn off, the thumping hangover is receding, and she’s already having second thoughts about her second thoughts about the rest of the crew out there on the smaller ships. Barbara, for one; her roommate was always nice, and visited her a few times in jail, mostly to bring her fat-free yogurt and whatever gossip she could manage. She starts to feel faintly sick as she contemplates the prospect of leaving them all there, a full crew crammed into a few handfuls of what are, as she knows all too well, poorly stocked and maintained ships. Now her head’s pounding with an impossible decision: leave them or recall them?

She really only meant to grab her things and get out, what little she had left in her cell, but then she remembers Dave’s guitar. It could be a bargaining chip in case he decides to get stroppy about her pulling her weight. Since she’s down here anyway, she might as well get their stuff too. She finds a trolley in the mess hall and puts her own stuff – her bear Booboo, some clothes, some makeup, little else – on it, and trundles it around to where the boys were kept. She checks Cat’s room, sees only his customised prison jumpsuits, and decides (rightly so) that he wouldn’t be seen dead in them again. Kill Crazy’s bunk has a badly embroidered CELL SWEET CELL tapestry hanging over it and, despite him being an utter nutter, she has to swallow hard against a lump in her throat. Mostly the other prisoners were okay; some were mad, some were homicidal, some were both, but now – now they’re all dead. Their reversal of the microbe’s effects hasn’t altered that. In fact the tiny piles of white powder remind her of when she first got out of stasis to discover everyone dead.

Suddenly she feels like she’s walking through a graveyard. She shivers, wishes she’d brought one of the boys down with her, and moves on.

Even if she hadn’t known whose bunk was which before entering the room, a few seconds’ glance would tell her. She’s not sure how Dave’s managed it, considering the prison food never contains anything so interesting, but there are poppadom crumbs in his bed. Some things never change. There’s also a quarter of a chip butty under his pillow, which she tweezes up between two hanky-covered fingers and tosses into the waste disposal unit. A couple of magazines under the mattress – she lets them stay – but it seems most of his stuff is in the cupboard with his spare uniforms, including his guitar. The strings are coiled in their paper packet and she wonders, after all they went through to get the blasted things, why did he not ever use them? Doubtless something to do with being three cells down from Big Meat, who always slept like a baby – i.e. waking up and screaming if anything disrupted him. He would not have appreciated the magpie-strangling sounds of Dave’s playing. _Her_ Dave had taken the time to learn properly on a hologrammatic guitar, inability to touch the real one giving him patience, not to mention Holly’s ability to mute it being rather welcome.

She checks Rimmer’s bunk next. Diary under the mattress. She drops it onto the pile of stuff without opening it, much as she wants to. Impeccably made bed, but if there’s one thing people always do it’s hide stuff under the mattress. Stupid. One of the other girls had pointed out that it was easy to slit open the side of the mattress – ‘with whatever ya _got_, Krissie’ – she’d explained when asked, as if it was common knowledge that everyone in the Brig should be carrying a shiv of some description. So her own diary had resided in the foot of her mattress, where even Kryten, who kept their cell perfect for inspections and was really annoying about making sure her sheets always had hospital corners, never found it.

He’s still got her knickers.

She knows they’re hers; there’s the slight snarl of elastic on the waistband she’d been meaning to stitch, plus who _else’s_ knickers would he be hiding under his pillow? Yvonne McGruder’s? Unlikely. No, they’re hers. She couldn’t retrieve them on the _Silverburg_ because if she’d lunged at him to snatch them back her blanket would’ve fallen off, and she hadn’t wanted him to cop even more of an eyeful than he did. After that had been out of the question; getting permission to get into the men’s wing was hard enough without trying to explain to Ackerman that it was to retrieve her _knickers_.

Aware that if anyone has followed her down or is watching her on the security cameras she will look utterly ridiculous, Kochanski tentatively sniffs them. Clean. He’s washed them and, apparently, not done anything... _else_ with them.

‘Get a grip, Kristine,’ she says aloud to the echoing empty halls. ‘It’s called wanking and you know they probably both do it.’

Well. It’s a start. An admittedly wussy start, but a start. Towards what? Admitting they’re both attracted to her? They’re not shy about it, either of them, although Rimmer keeps his mouth firmly shut on the matter around Lister, because why _would_ he want the other man to know he was competition?

‘He’s _not_ competition,’ she mutters fiercely, shoving the knickers in a pocket of her combat trousers. They’re surprisingly comfortable; now she’s not an officer or a prisoner she might get another few pairs, although perhaps in a more interesting colour than _did she really just think about them masturbating while thinking of her?_

Her head _really_ hurts now, and it’s not from the hangover. She wants to go back in her cell and lock it and become the Birdwoman of the Brig. She’ll make origami cranes to talk to and never come out.

Instead of that, she finishes gathering what few possessions might have some meaning outside the world of Floor 13, and then pushes the trolley back to the lift, and goes up to get on with her new life.


	2. Chapter 2

When Rimmer comes to again it’s to the wince-inducing memory that he thought Kochanski was a polar bear and then he called her an angel and why didn’t he  just say, ‘Hello, Kris, I have a hideous crush on you and would love to see you wearing only a blanket again,’ because at least he could’ve blamed it on the concussion and she would never have had to know.

She’s nowhere to be seen; in fact, he’s on his own in the medi-bay, but he can hear her voice and Lister’s voice just outside the door; they’re speaking in the sort of tone that means they both want to yell but neither of them want to be the first to crack.

‘But what about Hollister? We don’t even know which ‘bug the people we _like_ are on, and there’s no way we can expect anythin’ good from that fat git.’

‘We can’t just leave them all out there, Dave. They’ll _die_.’

‘I really, really wish you’d said somethin’ sooner, Kris.’

‘Sooner? _When_? When we were drunk? When we were trying to find the antidote to the microbe? When we were still in the Brig?’

‘Can you not yell? It hurts.’

‘I’m not yelling!’

Kochanski storms into the medi-bay, sees Rimmer attempting to sit up, and veers off course to thump a hand down on his shoulder, pushing him back down onto the bed. ‘Stay down,’ she snaps. ‘We haven’t had time to check you properly for concussion, and I’m not releasing you until we have.’ She snatches up his ice pack and shoves it back into the freezer and yanks out a fresh one, every movement sharp and economical. She practically smacks the new pack against the back of his head, hard enough to make him yelp with pain. ‘Sorry.’ Then she’s moving again, over to a refrigeration unit, pulling out an ampoule of something, slamming it into an ezi-ject hypo. Lister’s hovering in the doorway and she grabs him by one dreadlock and yanks his head sideways so she can inject whatever it is into his neck.

‘_Kris_!’ both men protest at once.

‘It’s a hangover cure,’ she says through thin lips. ‘Will you just trust me?’

Lister puts a hand to the side of his neck, looking a little stunned. Rimmer can understand that. They both know she’s an officer, at least in the eyes of the Space Corps that was; neither of them have seen her quite this revved up before. Her blue eyes dart from one of them to the other, silently challenging them to protest.

Lister’s the one stupid enough to say anything. Rimmer knows better than to piss off a polar bear.

‘Kris, I’m only sayin’, if we can work out which of the ‘bugs Petersen and Chen and whoever are on, we can contact them, arrange a rendezvous, somethin’ like that.’

‘And you’d feel okay about leaving everyone else to die?’

Contrary to orders, Rimmer struggles and sits up, leaning heavily against the wall. ‘After everything Hollister’s put us through, you really want to bring him back on board? He was prepared to leave us and all the other prisoners to the mercy of the microbe; do you really think if he comes back on board he’s going to pat us all on the back and hand out promotions?’

She _almost_ falters. Almost. But then she straightens her back and folds her arms and despite still being dressed in a tight black t-shirt and almost-as-tight combat trousers, she still manages to look every inch in command. ‘Rimmer. Lister. We’re contacting those ships and telling them it’s safe to return. I’m going to tell Kryten that we’re to slow down so they can catch up.’

‘I can’t _believe_ you’re pulling rank,’ Lister says, and he actually does look dazed by it, or maybe it’s by the way her folded arms pull her top even tighter over her breasts. ‘Kris...’

‘Don’t “Kris” me,’ she says. ‘Stay here and keep an eye on Rimmer and make sure he doesn’t get up. If we _are_ going to end up back in the Brig we might as well be healthy for it. Where’s the Cat?’

‘Still in Hollister’s quarters.’ Lister shifts, subtly, to block the doorway. ‘Kris, you can’t do this. We’ll all end up put away for life.’

‘Then so be it,’ she hisses. ‘Now _move_.’

Rimmer’s not sure which of them is more surprised when Lister does move, head hanging as he steps out of the way. He crosses the room to sit beside Rimmer’s bed; Kochanski leaves the room in a quick stomp of boots, bound for the Drive Room.

‘What was that all about?’ he asks eventually.

Rimmer sort of shakes his head but stops after one shake because it hurts too much to keep going. ‘I don’t know. She’s a lunatic. But maybe she’s got a point.’

‘Like what? Don’t tell me you think it’d be fun to spend the next twenty years in the Brig, even if it’s just us down there and the other prisoners’re all gone.’

‘They’re – gone?’

‘The microbe. The antidote didn’t bring them back. Holly’s runnin’ a scan of the ship to see if anyone’s left and if it did anythin’ to other organic stuff. Like food supplies, that sort of thing.’ He notices Rimmer’s ice pack for the first time. ‘What the smeg happened to you?’

‘The vending machine and I had words,’ Rimmer says in as dignified a tone as he can manage, which isn’t very.

Lister snorts laughter. ‘You look a right twonk.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

* * *

Kochanski walks into the Drive Room and instantly knows something’s not right. Kryten’s got that look on his face, the one that means he’s about five seconds away from some kind of cerebral meltdown.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Thu- thu- thu-’ He sees her looking around for something to hit him with and smacks his own head against the nearest wall panel. ‘The other ships, ma’am. I’ve just brought them up on the long-range scan and – and—’

‘And _what_?’

Kryten looks down at his hands and then back up at her. ‘I suspect the microbe has infected the ships, ma’am.’

Kochanski shoulders past him and looks down at the scanner screen. It’s not a question of suspicion. She can see that the lead _Starbug_ of the fleet doggedly flying after them has distinct black streaks from nose to tail.

‘Can we get back – oh, here, move, let me.’ She pushes his seat out of the way and rapidly enters a series of course calculations, which still come to her like breathing despite being away from her station for so long. She can feel the colour drain from her face as she works. The simple truth of the matter is that _Red Dwarf_ isn’t built to do U-turns, and they don’t have any ship to surface vehicles left that might be faster.

‘We can’t do it, can we, ma’am?’

Kochanski pushes back from the console and covers her face with her hands. Years and years ago she stepped out of stasis to be told by Holly that the whole crew was dead. This time it feels like it’s her fault.

She turns to the central comms console and reaches for the mic.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I have to at least warn them.’

‘I think they know,’ Kryten says, touching her shoulder, directing her attention back to the scanner screen. He’s magnified the view and, despite the distance, the fear is clear on the faces of the crew. He’s right. They know.

‘Then I have to tell the Science Officers...’ But her hand falters and falls to her side. They’re only watching one of the multitude of ships but one is enough to see what happens when the microbe insinuates itself between the molecules that make up the front viewport.

Suddenly it’s just blackness and she recoils before realising it’s because Kryten’s switched off the screen.

‘Kryten, no, I should watch.’

‘Miss Kochanski, I insist that you don’t. There’s nothing you can do for them now.’

‘But the other ships...’ She gropes for the mic and lifts it, finding the switches to set it to broadcast to the doomed fleet. Kryten’s giving her a funny look and she gropes for the right words, but there’s only one right word. If they don’t understand then there’s nobody alive who can help them anyway.

‘Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxhidexidroxhide.’

Over and over she repeats it, enunciating each syllable, each part of the compound’s name until she feels like a _Mary Poppins_ character, hoping that someone will hear and understand and—

‘It’s pointless, isn’t it?’ she says at last, shutting off the connection _before_ she says it. ‘Even if they do hear me their resources are so limited.’

‘Maybe the microbe hasn’t spread to all the ships.’

‘That pod was _in the landing bay_. Even if it didn’t get them there, they’re flying so close together...’ She isn’t sure if she wants to talk herself into or out of believing that there’s nothing to be done. ‘Zoom out. Show me the whole lot of them.’

Kryten hesitates, sees the serious expression on her face, obeys. The image fuzzes and foozles and finally settles into a scatter of green and blue ships on a black background. It looks as though some of them are fading into that background but she knows the truth.

‘Hey, Bud-babe, what’s going on?’ The Cat chooses this inopportune moment to wander in, wearing a dressing gown and rubbing his forehead, with a familiar hungover squint creasing his eyes half-closed.

‘Not now, sir,’ Kryten says.

‘But—’

‘Go on to the medi-bay and see if Rimmer or Dave want breakfast, Cat,’ Kochanski says, her eyes not leaving the screen.

‘I’m not the butler around h—’

‘Just _go_.’

Cat just goes; she can feel his eyes boring into her back before he turns to leave.

‘Kryten, go and make sure he doesn’t get lost.’

‘But ma’am, the medi-bay’s only—’

He’s been her cellmate for months and she got on reasonably well with her version of him; this is the only reason he gets a ‘Please?’ instead of a death glare, and she listens to his footsteps recede before reaching out and tentatively, almost timidly, switching the comms over to Listen.

All that’s out there is silence. Silence, punctuated by the occasional cry of pain, and someone feverishly repeating their ship’s JMC ident over and over, too fast to comprehend, until a wet pop that she really doesn’t want to know the origin of turns that, too, to silence. Someone else has managed to set the transmitter’s Morse code function to broadcast an S.O.S. but even that gets eaten by the darkness.

Finally she’s listening to nothing and looking at a few forlorn shells, until even those are gone. The screen’s gone blurry and she reaches for a hanky to wipe at it, thinking maybe she’s leaned in too close and fogged it with her breath, before realising that it’s actually the tears standing in her eyes that have made it look that way. She lifts the hanky and buries her face in it instead, smelling the clean-pressed citrusy scent thanks to Kryten’s diligence in the laundry, and then realises that it’s not a hanky, it’s the pair of her knickers she found under Rimmer’s pillow, and shoves them into the nearest waste disposal unit.

She’s glad Holly’s not watching her cry into her own knickers.

* * *

Rimmer’s still sitting up in bed; Lister’s roaming the room, poking at anything and everything, and the Cat is sitting on another bed ignoring them both and eating breakfast. Naturally he didn’t bring anything for either of them. It’s Kryten who does that, his face wrinkled into an unmistakable expression of worry as he clomps into the medi-bay, two metal trays in hand, and starts fussing with the table beside Rimmer’s bed.

‘What’s going on, you plastic gimboid?’

‘Nothing at all, sir!’ Kryten chirps, his tone not agreeing with his face.

‘Kryten, come on, man. Tell us the truth.’

‘Miss Kochanski is attempting to open communications with the _Starbugs_ and _Midgets_.’ He fidgets the tray lids open and Lister comes over, lured by the food to sit on the foot of the bed. That hangover cure must really have worked; Cat’s picking at his meal uninspiredly but Lister looks genuinely hungry.

Even through the throbbing at the back of his skull Rimmer can tell Kryten’s holding something back; there’s no real trick to it considering Kryten’s utterly crap at concealing his emotions. ‘And? What _else_ is going on?’

‘The microbe has infected the ships,’ Kryten says quietly.

Lister doesn’t look hungry any more. ‘What, all of them?’

‘As far as we can tell.’

‘When were you planning on sharing that little nugget of information with us, hmmm?’ Rimmer asks. ‘Any time this decade? _Before_ we spoke to Kochanski again?’

Kryten wibbles. ‘Oh, sir, I’m so sorry, but she told me to come down here, and I—’

‘—haven’t the spine of so much as a jellyfish. We know.’ Rimmer pushes his blanket away and makes a decent attempt at standing up.

Lister snorts. ‘That’s rich comin’ from _you_.’

‘Lister... shut up.’ His legs are working. His torso’s working, although this new position has made his chest point out that hey, he landed on it too, ow, thank you very much. In fact everything south of his chin seems to be in reasonable working order, it’s just his head that’s debatably functional, which fact he does _not_ repeat aloud knowing that Lister will only raise the question of whether or not he was doing anything important with it anyway. ‘Where is she?’

‘Drive Room,’ Kryten says, making a game attempt not to whimper.

Lister gets up off the end of the bed and there’s a tense moment when he and Rimmer reach the medi-bay door at the same time, but Rimmer’s just a stride faster and not afraid of using his elbows. The Cat and Kryten trail behind them on the way to the Drive Room. He’s getting envious of the officers all over again; the Drive Room and medi-bay and officers’ mess hall and sleeping quarters are all located in very close proximity, whereas his and Lister’s old quarters are in what one would refer to as the arse end of nowhere only if one were being extremely charitable.

She’s sitting at the centre scanner screen, which shows nothing except the blackness of Deep Space illuminated only by a few distant suns. Her knees are pulled up to her chest and she looks as though everything she’s ever cared about has been pulverised into a thousand tiny pieces. When he realises the significance of the black screen he also realises that this is pretty much the truth.

Lister gets to her first and puts a hand on her shoulder and she kind of collapses sideways against his chest for a moment before she straightens up again, and Rimmer feels a brief flare of a very familiar emotion: jealousy. Then she’s turning the chair to face them all, and puts her feet on the floor and folds her arms across her chest instead, and even though she’s sitting down and she’s such a small woman anyway her presence is nonetheless the most imposing in the room.

‘They’re gone.’ Her voice hitches only a very little, then steadies. ‘The microbe has taken out all of the ships that were following us. As highest ranking crew member, I’m declaring myself acting Captain. Any objections?’ Her blue eyes travel from Lister to Rimmer to Cat to Kryten, daring any one of them to so much as open their mouths.

‘No, ma’am,’ Kryten says, visibly relieved that someone is taking charge of the situation.

‘Whatever you say, Bud-babe.’

‘Kris... you’re not really pulling rank on us, are you?’

‘Someone has to,’ she says, half snapping. ‘Every group, any group, needs a leader.’

‘You _are_ the best suited to the role, ma’am—’ and Rimmer’s hand gets halfway up before she _does_ snap, ‘Don’t you _dare_ salute me. We’re not that sort of operation, Rimmer.’

She still says it in a way that makes it rhyme with ‘scum’, she really does.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says meekly, forcing his hand back down to his side.

Lister’s still staring at her with a kind of gape-brained idiocy. ‘Kris, can we at least discuss this?’

‘We can discuss this once we’re on course for Earth and have some idea of how long the journey’s going to take if we divert power from all non-essential systems into the steering, guidance and drive systems,’ she says, standing up and crossing to her old seat, her navigation seat. She moves with amazing grace considering she’s just watched over a thousand people die. ‘Holly, begin systems analysis, and I want an up to date supplies list, and give me the status of the stasis booths.’

‘Blimey, don’t ask for much, do you?’ Holly finally speaks up, flashing up onto the scanner console. ‘D’you want a cup of tea and a biscuit as well while you’re waiting?’

Kochanski’s fingers flash across her keyboard and she shoots a tight, unimpressed smile at the computer. ‘No. I’m setting this up, and then I’m going to have a bath.’

Rimmer looks at her and then looks at Lister, who’s looking at her with the same idiot stare, only now the unmistakable old infatuation’s in his eyes as well and he looks ready to drop to his hands and knees and offer himself up as a footstool if it’ll help.

Pathetic.


	3. Chapter 3

Settling into her bath a good three hours later, having left Kryten in charge of the supplies manifest and the other three to their own devices, Kochanski can’t quite relax. She’s got a glass of red wine perched on the shelf beside the bath – no old retro housing this time, this time it’s her own bath in her own quarters, and even if it is too small to stretch out comfortably, it’s still enough to soak in. She’s got a box of chocolates as well, despite the nagging feeling that declaring herself Captain will in and of itself add inches to her waistline. She can remember interminable meetings with Hollister during which she could swear he gained a few pounds in the space of a couple of hours.

She only realises that she forgot to lock her quarters’ door when she hears footsteps just outside the bathroom door. Great. Her own space, so small that to sit on the loo she practically has to put her feet in the bath, and yet it still can’t be just hers.

‘Kris? D’you want me to scrub your back?’

‘Go _away_, Dave.’

‘Or wash your hair?’ His tone is coaxing rather than nagging. ‘You used to like that.’

She did. She suspects she still would. For a man who pays so little attention to his own personal hygiene, he was always quite caring about hers, although she’s pretty sure that was more to do with getting to touch her all wet and soapy and naked rather than any particular desire to get her clean. And he was always careful with her hair, running his fingers through it over and over to get the tangles out.

This is a memory of _her_ Dave, of course. Of the few weeks they’d spent together before the accident, though, not of the more recent, stronger relationship they’d spent years building. When he was young, and she was young, and neither of them had been plunged into the nightmare of being alone in space, three million years from home.

Once it looked as though she was never going to get back to her own dimension, her thoughts had turned from time to time to _this_ Dave, to what-if and maybe-we-could. But then he’d do something disgusting or stupid or disgustingly stupid, or hideously idiotic like getting involved in Shower Night (she’s still not at all convinced he had nothing to do with it), and she’d relegate him firmly back to the _not a chance in hell_ pile.

Well, now they’re right back in hell, if one might define being stuck in space with a tiny crew and no idea which way is up as hell, and now he’s poking his head around the door hopefully, and if this is hell she might as well spend it with _someone_.

Right now, though, all she wants is to be left alone with her bath and her wine and her chocolates, so she raises her eyes to meet his puppy-dog expression and says as gently as she can manage, ‘Not now, okay? I need to be alone.’

His face crumples like a crushed Leopard Lager can, but he nods and backs out without another word; the bathroom door closes, and she hears the quarters door close, and it’s all just in time for him to not see the hot tears that were gathering in her eyes finally begin to fall.

* * *

Rimmer’s in the sleeping quarters reading a book on the history of the solar system when Lister comes wandering in like a stray dog, metaphorical ears and tail down, rather than his usual state of mostly relaxed wagginess.

‘Turned you down, did she?’

‘Shut up, Rimmer.’ Lister climbs the ladder to flop down on his bunk; Rimmer just arches an eyebrow and keeps reading.

‘Did you know Pluto got declassified as a planet once? Back in the early twentieth century. They started calling it a dwarf planet instead, until there was a riot in 2012, mostly comprised of thirty-something nerds who’d grown up with it being one of the nine planets and refused to believe that scientists could change a planet’s classification.’

‘Why’re you telling me this, Rimmer?’

‘Because, you modo, you’ve been declassified too. You’re not Kochanski’s love interest any more. You’re just one of her subordinates, like the rest of us.’

Lister chucks his pillow at Rimmer’s head; Rimmer ducks it, so the only ill-effect it has is that Lister has to get back down and retrieve it. He does so, picking it up and hugging it and giving Rimmer a forlorn look that’s tinged with anger. ‘What would you know? You weren’t on _Starbug_ with us, you don’t know how close me and her were gettin’.’

‘I know how close you are now, though, and that’s not very.’

‘It’s only two hundred yards down the corridor to her quarters. She asked to be alone and I respected that. It’s got nothin’ to do with whether she likes me or not.’

‘Which she doesn’t, or she’d’ve asked you to stay.’

Lister puts his pillow back on his bunk, fluffing it, deliberately not looking at him. ‘You don’t know that. You don’t know her like I know her.’

‘What makes you say that? She and I spent a fair bit of time alone on the _Silverberg_. We had quite a good conversation going before you burst in with your harpoon gun, m’laddo. We’ve talked other times, too. Contrary to what you might think, Lister, he two of you don’t exist in some special unique bubble. She does communicate with other people as well.’ He is half winding Lister up, half serious. Quite frankly the man’s lovesick idiocy really does make it seem as though Lister thinks that because this Kochanski had a relationship with an alternate version of him back in her home dimension, she’ll jump into bed with him just as soon as – as soon as – well, he’s not sure what Lister thinks she’s waiting for. Surely if it were going to happen, it would’ve happened by now?

‘I know that. But we’ll get back together, you’ll see.’ The confidence is creeping back into his voice.

‘What, even after she was naked in bed with me?’ Rimmer pauses before the killing blow. ‘I think I’ve even still got her knickers somewhere...’

This time he doesn’t manage to duck the pillow, but the pillow is a mere nothing compared to the hundred and sixty pounds of Scouser that comes hurtling across the sleeping quarters and barrels into him, smashing him off the chair and onto the ground. His book goes flying. Lister’s sitting on his stomach, fist wrapped in his hair, prefatory to lifting his head and smacking it against the floor. The expression on his face is one Rimmer’s never seen before, not even in one of Lister’s most smegged-off moments, not just because it’s half hidden by rapidly expanding circles of black because he can’t catch his breath.

He paddles with his feet, trying to turn sideways and throw Lister off, but even with his superior fitness Lister’s still bloody heavy, and also driven by anger, and Rimmer only has time to get one hand up and try to push him away before Lister yanks his head up – a hundred needling pains as he almost loses his hair – and then smashes it back down against the floor. The floor that is covered by only the barest pretence of carpet. Not that it matters, because the part of his skull that hits the deck is the exact spot where he got hammered by the Coke can. A galaxy of ugly red stars explodes across the black circles, and the last thing he hears before he passes out is Kryten’s panicked squeal of, ‘_Sirs_!’

* * *

Kochanski thinks wryly that if she spends any more time in the medi-bay she’s going to have to investigate the medical officer’s exams procedure. Same bed, one of the same ice packs, same idiot she’s applying it to. Lister’s confined to quarters of his own accord, she could probably override his door locks and enforce it but she’s already being Captain and navigation officer and medical officer; she doesn’t have the time nor the energy to be a penal officer too. Besides, Kryten is in there with him, dispensing his own brand of counselling, and right now she thinks that might be a better idea than her being around Dave. For one thing, she feels like she might clobber him the way he did Rimmer.

There’s a pained groan from the man she’s tending to, and his eyes ease open, and he mumbles, ‘Oh god, not again.’

‘My sentiments exactly,’ Kochanski says dryly. ‘What did you say to him to provoke him? Don’t try and tell me you didn’t.’

Rimmer’s silent for a moment but she gives him a stern look and he confesses, ‘I told him I thought I still had your knickers somewhere. From when we ran into Cassandra,’ he adds, as if there are numerable occasions on which he might have obtained her knickers and he needs to clarify which one.

‘And _do_ you?’ She knows perfectly well that he doesn’t; she wants to see what he will say.

He sort of squirms. ‘That ice pack’s dribbling down my neck.’

‘Rimmer...’

‘As far as I know they’re still on Floor 13.’

It isn’t a full and unvarnished answer, but it’s close enough to one for her to reasonably give him a Look. ‘Any real reason why you held onto them? I thought you fancied your chances with McGruder.’

Rimmer makes a sound that comes out as ‘Nnnneh’ and pushes the ice pack away and it’s about all the reply she’s going to get from him. She drops the ice pack on the table and puts her hands on the edge of the bed, leaning close.

‘Look, Rimmer. I know the chances of you paying attention to me are remote, but you have to stop baiting him. Joking around is one thing, but I will _not_ have my crew hurting each other.’ Rimmer opens his mouth, but Kochanski keeps talking, ignoring him. ‘I’ll be speaking to him as well, and if it means moving one of you to different quarters, then so be it. I think we’re better off being close together, but not if this is going to happen.’ She leans back again and sighs. ‘I don’t get it. You two have lived together for _years_. You haven’t always been this bad. Why now?’

Rimmer’s been opening and shutting his mouth the whole time, like a baby bird attempting to cheep for attention. ‘Permission to speak, ma’am?’

‘Oh, for – Permission granted. No whinging.’

‘I wasn’t going to whinge. I was going to say that you’ve got to remember, I’m not “his” Rimmer.’ He invests the words with a surprising amount of vitriol. ‘As far as I’m concerned, he annoyed me for eight months, then I died, then I was resurrected so he could annoy me even more, only with the added delight of it being in the Brig.’

‘You’re whinging.’

‘Sorry.’ He almost sounds sincere. ‘You may be right though. Maybe I should move. He’s got you now, anyway.’

Kochanski blinks at that. ‘He what? Rimmer, he hasn’t “got” me. Nobody’s “got” me. I am – _not_ “got”.’

‘Well, he’s certainly planning to get you if he can,’ Rimmer says. ‘I’ve never known anyone in my life to be so unhealthily obsessed with a woman. It’s almost disturbing.’

Before she can think and stop herself, Kochanski retorts, ‘That’s rich coming from the man who kept my knickers as a souvenir when we didn’t even sleep together.’ The instant the words are out she regrets them. She’s trying to establish her competency, not descend to their schoolyard level. But it seems to be okay, because he’s too busy looking disgusted at himself to glare at her. ‘Get some rest. I’ll inspect the rooms, find one you can shift into.’ She gets up and leaves without saying anything more, not trusting herself to come out with another unprofessional outburst.

No wonder Lister cracked it with him. He has a way of getting under one’s skin and sticking there like a bit of sand or grit, irritating, irritating, irritating.

* * *

Rimmer tries to rest, but it’s impossible. His head feels as though someone has cracked it open and started using his occipital lobe as a xylophone.

He’s not sorry for what he said to Lister. He was only making fun. Lister overreacted. It’s not his fault Lister overreacted. Kochanski has a nerve coming in and telling him off like that, especially when he’s in pain. She didn’t even leave him a fresh ice pack. Some superior officer she is, leaving one of her crew in pain just to go and find a bunkroom she can shunt him into. It’ll probably be miles from anyone and right now he feels like that would be just fine. He doesn’t want to see any of them, especially not her, with her overbearing manner and her orders and her ice packs.

He wishes that the nanobots had never brought him back. Failing that, he wishes they’d managed to reconstruct his brain in an officer’s body so he could at least pretend to have some sort of authority here. He’s angry that she’s stepped into the role of Captain so (to his mind) easily; angry that she can give orders and he’ll obey because that’s what he does; angry that she seems to have all four of them, five if you count Holly, under her delicate little thumb.

And now he’s angry at himself for letting these thoughts run around so madly in his mind, because out of sheer coincidence the thought about her giving orders has brushed up against the memory of her wearing nothing but a tatty old blanket, shoulders bare, hair falling over them as if it could mask the smoothness of her skin, so now he’s got a tingly feeling of arousal spreading through him to contend with on top of everything else.

‘Oh _smeg_,’ he says aloud, wishing he had something to hit.

‘What’s wrong, man?’

If Kochanski is the last person he wants to see right now, Lister is second last. With a bullet. Rimmer rolls onto his side, wishing he were closer to the operating surgery, wherein there might be something better with which to defend himself than his ice pack. Or his pillow. But pillows are Lister’s favoured weapon.

The only bright side to hearing that voice is that it instantly kills his erection, so at least that’s one less thing to have to think about with his poor bruised brain.

‘Come in to finish the job, have you, Lister?’

Lister slouches over to sit in the chair by the bed, uncomfortably close. ‘No. I came to say I’m sorry.’

‘She told you to, didn’t she?’

Lister fidgets, pulling a dreadlock forward over his shoulder and fiddling with the end. ‘Yeah. But I was gonna _anyway_.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

Lister looks pained. Actually, he looks faintly constipated, or that might just be Rimmer’s uncharitable opinion. ‘No, really, I was. I mean, that was a really smeggin’ smeggy thing you said, but I overreacted.’

This is so obviously Rimmer’s cue to apologise for hurting Lister’s feelings in the first place that he doesn’t want to say anything at all. But he knows that if he doesn’t, and leaves the air uncleared, _Captain_ Kochanski will get on his case about it.

‘You’re right, it wasn’t a nice thing to say.’ _Nearly_ there. ‘I’m sorry.’ He can’t meet Lister’s eyes when he says it, though. Mostly because looking at Lister’s genuinely contrite expression reminds him of who the nice one is here, that it’s not him, and that it’s unlikely to ever be him. ‘I’m going to move to different quarters so you won’t have me breathing down your neck all the time.’

Lister pulls that face where one eyebrow goes up and his forehead wrinkles like a shar-pei’s. Put a floppy bow in his stupid dreadlocks and he’d probably win Best in Show at Crufts. ‘You don’t have to do _that_.’

‘Why not? It’ll give you more opportunities to try and seduce Kochanski if I’m not around – and believe me, I don’t _want_ to be around for _that_.’

Lister grins. Rimmer’s surprised he’s not panting. Rimmer’s surprised he’s not dashing down the corridor to find Kochanski and hump her leg, in fact. ‘That’s true. I’ll try to keep the noise down.’

‘Should it transpire that there is in fact any noise _to_ be kept down, I’d appreciate that.’ He’s pretty sure he can hear the gears whirring in Lister’s skull trying to process that. Great, now Lister’s not just a lovesick puppy, he’s a robot lovesick puppy and Rimmer really isn’t sure any more that he doesn’t have a concussion. ‘Now will you kindly smeg off, I’m trying to sleep.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ Lister says, getting up with a scrawp of chair legs on the deck that makes Rimmer wince. ‘D’you need anythin’?’

Rimmer needs – or at least really, really wants – a fresh ice pack, a packet of painkillers, and a couple of gallons of medicinal alcohol, but he is not going to ask Lister for anything. ‘No, I’m fine.’ He pauses and then adds, ‘Thanks.’

If he’s going to have to start tolerating Lister for Kochanski’s sake, then he might as well start making nice now. Who knows, if he fakes it long enough he might even start believing it.


	4. Chapter 4

_One Month Later_

Kochanski knows what Lister’s going to say before he says it, and is halfway through thinking up yet another rejection that doesn’t sound too harsh but that doesn’t undermine her authority, when she realises he’s stopped mid-sentence and is looking down at his hands, or rather what’s in his hands, instead.

‘Forget it. I know you’re only gonna say no,’ he mumbles. He holds out the single red rose anyway. ‘I went down to the botanical gardens and got you this. You can have it even if you’re not gonna say yes.’

She takes it from him. It’s still fresh; he must have been really careful with it on the way up from the gardens, so she feels even worse. ‘Dave, listen, I just don’t have time right at the moment. Powering the ship up to light speed’s going to take a while, not to mention that we have to worry about crashing into things even when Holly’s got all his attention focused on navigating at normal speed, let alone if we go any faster.’

‘Yeah, but you look smeggin’ exhausted. Are you even sleepin’ properly?’

‘As well as can be expected,’ Kochanski says evasively. The rose’s petals feel soft and slightly damp with dew. Lister’s taken to spending a lot of time in the gardens; small as they are, they’ve become a kind of retreat for him. Similarly, Rimmer’s often to be found in the Obs Dome, gazing out at the stars, when he’s not using the corridors of the officers’ decks as his own personal running track. She’s not sure if it’s something she should worry about, the two of them going off on their own so often; but then she spends so much of her time alone, or quasi-alone considering Holly’s constant yet often silent presence, in the Drive Room. On the other hand she’s working; they’re just – just moping, or something. She keeps meaning to take some time out to get the whole crew together and do something _fun_, as a _team_, but then Holly spits out another dozen pages of course calculations that she needs to check and she forgets again.

‘Kris, I know that means you’re not. Come on. Let me take you somewhere quiet to eat where Kryten won’t whinge at us both. No funny business.’

She hasn’t had any “funny business” for a long time, and in fact would be quite partial to some, but her new responsibilities make it impossible to commit to anything beyond the running of the ship. Nonetheless, she acquiesces to the dinner idea. ‘All _right_ then. But you’re not to complain if I come straight back here afterwards.’

‘I’d rather you went to bed,’ Lister says; he only goes sort of pinkish when she shoots him a medium-strength glare. ‘To _sleep_. We’re not gonna get back to Earth any faster if you smeg up the calculations ‘cause you’re tired.’

Kochanski is a veteran of pulling double shifts, not to mention looking perky in the mornings when she’s been out dancing all night, but she doesn’t have the rest of the department as backup any more. Reluctantly she has to admit it – he’s right.

She doesn’t say this aloud, though, just, ‘Where did you have in mind for dinner?’

 

They end up down in the gardens with vending machine food. It’ll do. Lister brings a picnic blanket with apparently no ulterior motive, and the two of them sit side by side under an oak tree that, finding itself thwarted in growing up by the gardens’ ceiling, has grown out instead; wide, long branches droop more like a willow’s than anything else, creating a hideaway place, a secret green cave. The plants have all gone a bit wild, but there’s a distinct track between the gardens’ entrance and the oak tree. How often must he come in here to have made such a track?

‘All this used to be off limits to us,’ Lister says. ‘Strictly botany officers only.’ He points between the leaves at a squat grey metal box, about three feet tall and wide by nine feet long, that’s an unpretty inorganic addition to the gardens. ‘They were testin’ all these plants to see which ones might work best when Triton got terraformed.’ He peels the lid off his vindaloo tray and puts it carefully into the bag they’ve brought for garbage; Kochanski does likewise with her fettuccini carbonara. ‘They were gonna go for a sort of bonsai garden effect.’

‘How do you know this?’ Kochanski twirls her fork in the pasta. ‘I didn’t think you had anything to do with the terraforming program.’

‘I didn’t. I got bored one day – one day ages ago, before the Brig and all that – and went through the ship’s layout maps to see if there was anywhere interestin’ I hadn’t been yet. All the other stuff was in the botany team’s notes. Except for the off limits part.’

She knows about that part; she saw the bland black AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY painted on the outer airlock into this place on their way in. It opened for them, of course; everywhere opens for them now that Holly’s under new orders. She thinks it’s just like Dave to choose to break into the botanical gardens instead of, oh, asking Holly for access to the crew’s confidential files. For her own part she remembers when she first came out of stasis, talking Holly into opening the AR suite for her so she could go in and spend hours in all her favourite other worlds, until one day he stopped letting her in and insisted she talk to her Dave and Cat instead.

In retrospect she can see how they both responded to the news of being the last human alive by retreating into the worlds borne of their own respective addictions. It’s a somewhat unsettling thought.

Lister’s giving her a quizzical look. ‘Kris? What’s up?’

‘Just thinking,’ she says, lifting another forkful of pasta to her mouth and eating it before she can voice any of what she’s thinking. This place is far too nice to spoil it with such negativity.

He pulls out what she hopes is a clean hanky and reaches over to wipe a spot of sauce from the corner of her mouth, his fingers lingering on her cheek for a moment before he pulls away. It’s a damn sight more romantic a gesture than his usual ham-handed attempts at seduction; she can still remember the night he was infected with the Epideme virus, her fist connecting with his jaw and sending him to the floor. And that stupid business with Women’s Shower Night. It’s no wonder he’s being so cautious, albeit persistent, now.

‘Dave...’

‘I thought _I_ was meant to be the messy eater.’

‘Dave...’ His hand’s still on her cheek, and she’s wondering if it counts as cheating if it’s with an alternate version of your partner, and he’s giving her a hopeful look, and she remembers, too, the clumsy passion with which he kissed her when she woke up in the medi-bay and thought she was home again.

She falls into the kiss like falling off a log. Like falling off a cliff. Easy and familiar and yet she feels like she’s just started something that’ll end in a screaming shattering crash onto the rocks. But as he kisses her, his hand stealing around to  the back of her neck to hold her close, she kisses back, fork falling with a squish into her pasta dish, twining one of his dreads around her finger, which makes him make a funny noise deep in the back of his throat. There’s something reassuring about the familiar spicy taste of his mouth that makes this stupid dimension feel like home.

He breaks off long enough to push the food trays out of the way and then puts his arms around her properly and she clings to him like a falling woman hanging onto a parachute that she didn’t have time to put on before jumping out of the plane. Gradually they ease down onto the blanket, until they’re side by side, entangled, one of his hands sneaking up under her t-shirt—

—and the door to the gardens opens, and they both hear Kryten calling, in a tone of false innocence, ‘Mr Lister, sir?’

* * *

What exactly is irritating Lister, Rimmer’s not sure. He came back from his dinner date with Kochanski looking furious, and now she’s closeted away in the Drive Room again with Holly and several reams of computer printouts. Kryten’s been waddling around dusting things that don’t need it and looking smug.

Rimmer notices these things as he runs around the rough circle of corridor around the block of sleeping quarters they’re all now housed in. Not only is it good exercise, it gives him great opportunities to be nosy. Not to mention that it’s a not so subtle way of having a dig at Lister without actually saying anything. He can’t let it drop altogether, his habit of having digs at Lister. Apart from anything else he’s still angry about the incident with the sexual magnetism virus. He’d been angry enough to realise that all the good things he’d thought had happened while using it had been the product of his mind in Artificial Reality; Lister’s little stunt with it on their first day in the Brig had only made it worse, even if Ackerman _had_ intervened before anything happened.

He’s mostly brooding about this because it seems monstrously unfair that even in his imagination he needs a virus just to attract women to him, while Lister just has to smile his stupid smile and quote something out of one of his stupid movies and has the women falling all over him. Unfair.

He finishes his laps and goes to shower. At least with the crew reduced from over a thousand to five – four if you discount Kryten, plus Lister’s grottiness and the Cat’s excessive cleanliness cancel each other out – they no longer have to worry quite so much about running out of water. Still, he tries not to take too long, getting out and drying off as soon as he’s clean, dressing in clean clothes, setting his running gear aside to go into Kryten’s laundry pile. He’s the middle ground between the extremes of Lister’s rarely-changed gear and Cat’s seven or eight outfits per day. Whether being the sensible, neat, organised one is going to work out for him in the end, well, that’s what he’s planning to go and try to find out.

The Drive Room is not far from their habitation deck. He goes straight there, not hesitating or hurrying; though his emotions are a mess he manages to keep them on the inside. This is a particularly good thing because many of them are not all that pleasant.

She’s sitting at her workstation, pencil in hand, doodling aimlessly around the edge of a page of equations. If he sees lovehearts he’s out of here. But there are no hearts, and she looks up and doesn’t glare at him, wonder of wonders.

‘What’s wrong, Rimmer? Something happened?’

‘Nothing’s happened. I came to see if you were all right. Lister’s sitting in his quarters playing the guitar and refusing to talk to anyone; I thought maybe you two had had a falling out.’ He pulls up another chair to sit not far from her but giving her plenty of breathing room. She looks as though she needs it.

‘Oh, no,’ she says with a strange little laugh. ‘No, Kryten just can’t let us get through so much as a meal together without interrupting.’ He has the feeling there’s something else she’s not admitting to, but doesn’t push it.

‘Is there anything I can do to help here?’ He looks at the piles of pages. It looks like she’s got a course plotted all the way back to Earth. She probably does.

‘I know you never passed your exam, but how far did you get with your studies?’ She holds up the page she’s working on. ‘As in, can you read this?’

A single glance is enough to tell him the answer. He briefly considers lying, but knows she’ll catch him out. ‘No. Maybe if you showed me...’

‘I think it’s quicker if I do it myself.’ She gives him a rueful little smile.

Finally he asks the question that’s been on his mind ever since they first got in this predicament. ‘Why don’t we just go into stasis?’

Kochanski sighs, her shoulders sagging. ‘I was wondering when you’d ask. It’s a good idea in theory. In practice, Da- Lister doesn’t want to, and neither do I. You’d understand if you’d been through what we have. Last time, both of us came out to an empty ship. We’re both afraid that if we try it again, we’ll never come out.’

He can’t help but give her an incredulous look, despite the fact that he’s attempting to be someone she can talk to. ‘And that’s it? Your main reason for not wanting to go into stasis is because you’re afraid you’ll never come out? Why? Do you think Holly’ll get lost without you?’

‘Oi,’ Holly says from the central monitor. ‘I heard that.’

‘Holly, can you give us privacy, please?’ Kochanski asks.

‘All right, I’m going, sorry to bother you. Three million years driving this crate and he thinks I’ll get us lost, I don’t know...’ Holly’s complaining fades and is gone. As soon as he’s gone Kochanski turns back to Rimmer; she looks seriously unhappy.

‘Can I tell you something, promise not to tell Dave?’

Rimmer contains the urge to smirk and just says, ‘Yes, of course, I can keep a secret.’

Kochanski blows out a relieved sigh so hard that it flips a few strands of hair away from her face. ‘I thought I was going to go mad not telling anyone,’ she admits.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t think we’re going to make it back to Earth.’

Rimmer wasn’t expecting that. He was expecting – well, he’s not quite sure what he was expecting, but not that. Not that one sentence delivered in such a steady tone given its content. She can’t meet his eyes, though. She’s looking down at her pencil.

‘Wh-why?’ he manages at last.

‘The ship’s over three million years old. It’s been deconstructed and reconstructed, which not only altered some of the systems but weakened them. Then the microbe destroyed parts of it and we have no way of telling whether the antidote accurately fixed everything until something goes wrong. I don’t trust the stasis booths to function properly any more. We’re frankly lucky that Holly’s working as well as he is and I’m surprised not to find more errors in this course charting.’ She ticks the points off on her fingers, still not looking at him. ‘Even if we figure out a way to reach light speed, our solar system is still a long way away. A _long_ way, especially in a ship that’s not exactly structurally sound. As in we might die of old age before we even get there.’

Now she does look at him, and try as she might she can’t keep her lower lip from shaking. He can see the tears gleaming in her eyes.

‘I don’t know what to tell Dave,’ she whispers. ‘It’s his dream. It’s the only thing keeping him going.’

Rimmer’s torn between feeling awkward because she’s about to cry and feeling abjectly terrified at the thought of dying. He’s trying to think of what he’s supposed to do as her erstwhile confidante rather than as her subordinate and failing, but then she actually _does_ start crying, and he gets up and grabs a box of tissues off the neighbouring console and offers it to her without needing to think about it. He even puts his hand on her shoulder, and then all of a sudden she’s clinging to him like she’s drowning and he’s the last of the _Titanic_’s lifeboats, her arms around his waist and her tears wetting his shirt front, and now he’s really out of his depth so he just awkwardly strokes her hair and lets her cry.

Finally she lets out one last sniffle and pulls away. ‘If you ever tell anyone I did that, I’ll demote you,’ she says, but it’s with a tiny smile, plus it’s hard for anyone blowing their nose to look all that threatening.

Rimmer straightens up and salutes – she glares at him, but it’s only an ordinary raise of his hand to his forehead and he does it without thinking about her injunction against such things. ‘Understood, Miss Kochanski, ma’am.’

She gives him another half-hearted glare. ‘Just go and change your shirt, Rimmer.’

He glances down and sees the splotches of tears on it. ‘Right. I’ll, um, go.’ He backs up a few steps and then stops. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’ll be all right. Go on.’ She flaps her hand at him and he obediently goes, making it back to his quarters without running into anyone else, trading the shirt for a fresh one, checking the damp one to see if it needs washing or just drying out, eyeing the tear spots critically. It smells like her hair or her perfume or something.

The smell sends an odd little tingle through him, and he realises with sudden dismay that this isn’t just about trying to get into bed with her again _without_ being interrupted before anything can happen. No, no, no. This can’t be happening. He’s a Love Celibate, for smeg’s sake. Love Celibates might go out and have sex occasionally just to prove that it’s merely another bodily function with no more emotion attached to it than breathing, but they don’t – he doesn’t – he shouldn’t—

He’s quite fond of breathing. The thing now is that he’s just realised he’s quite possibly more than quite fond of Kochanski. She can be abrasive and bossy and because Lister’s chasing her she’s probably going to end up unobtainable, which brings her ridiculously close to being his ideal woman. And she’s an _officer_. And she’s his _superior_. And she’s ridiculously attractive. He keeps the memory of her on Shower Night locked away in his head, like he’s trying not to over-remember it, like it’ll wear out if he does. But he does remember her body; the swell of her breasts, the soft flare of her hips, the way she looks when she’s twisted around trying to reach the small of her back with the sponge. Some of the other girls were all over each other, their shower habits drawing whoops and yells from all the other prisoners, but he’d mostly focused on her, as had Lister.

He can’t do this to Lister. Not because he feels like being particularly honourable, but just because he’s scared of the possible repercussions, like Lister going ballistic and attacking him again.

This is what he’s thinking as he twists his shirt around his fingers, holding it close to his face to get one last scent of her, before he tosses it into the laundry basket and turns away to sit back down and start studying. He’s going to give the stupid exam another shot if it kills him.

He makes it eight and a half minutes before he pulls the shirt back out again and stows it under his pillow, feeling sentimental and idiotic and aroused and ashamed all at the same time.

* * *

Kochanski’s getting sick of the Drive Room. More precisely she’s getting sick of working, and sick of how easy it is for the others to find her and pester her. Plus now she’s annoyed at herself for getting all weepy at Rimmer, although she’s pleasantly surprised that he was actually helpful and supportive and, moreover, kept his mouth shut.

Kryten comes wandering in at what the ship’s clock tells her is nine PM and brings her some food: cheese, crackers, celery sticks and a little dish of hummus. ‘Sorry to  have interrupted your meal earlier, ma’am, I thought you might appreciate something more to eat.’

‘Kryten... oh, never mind.’ She wants to ask what the hell his problem is and knows it won’t do her any good to know his exact reasoning for being such a pain in the backside. If he gets any worse she’ll – and she feels guilty even thinking it – restore his core programming and then break him of it herself, because then maybe he’ll turn out like _her_ Kryten.

The notion that she can turn them all into the same people as in her own dimension is laughable, and yet she occasionally entertains it at the very back of her mind. It’s a stupid idea; she may be the Captain now but that doesn’t mean they’re going to bend to her will on every little thing. Except maybe Rimmer; he’s got that idiotic blind obedience to authority still and she’s the one in charge – even if he doesn’t like it she knows he’ll respect it.

‘How are those course calculations coming along, ma’am?’

‘They’ll be finished in about a week, and then we can start implementing the physical changes that need to be made to the ship. There shouldn’t be anything too major but some of the circuits need manual override to be shut down.’

‘What exactly were you planning to shut down?’

‘Just nonessentials – lights and electricals to parts of the ship we won’t use, things like that.’

‘Excellent idea, ma’am.’

Kochanski tries not to look too annoyed at this bit of toadying. Apart from anything else he doesn’t sound entirely sincere; she suspects he’s sucking up to her to make up for interrupting her and Dave earlier.

Dave. He’s not _her_ Dave, but she thinks she can maybe tolerate him. Maybe. He’s obviously trying so hard to do everything right and it’s not his fault Kryten’s such a pain. But there are so many differences between him and her Dave: he’s so uncultured and slobby and even showing up with the rose doesn’t change that. She glances at it, sitting in a drink holder full of water (a vase would probably fall over). The trouble is that he’s just the way he ever was but that she’s outgrown that version of him. The trouble is that she’s never going to get back to her own version of him so she might as well settle for what she’s got.

The trouble is that Kristine Zoë Kochanski has never been a fan of just settling for what she’s got.

 She realises Kryten’s talking at her again and offers him the now depleted tray of food without asking him to repeat what he said; she caught enough of it to understand. ‘I’ll be up for another hour tops, then I’ll get some sleep, all right?’

‘Very good, ma’am.’ His face betrays not a twitch of emotion. She envies him.


	5. Chapter 5

_One Week Later_

The officers’ club is rarely this loud. It’s usually filled with quiet chatter, the occasional laugh, and the click of pool balls from the table at one end. But currently it’s thundering with music because Dave’s decided to hold a Back to Earth party now that their course is finalised. He’s drinking like a fish even though she’s warned him numerous times that they have to go over the ship turning things off. During the week a couple of electrical shorts caused fires that they had to go and put out, and the sooner all nonessential systems are shut down, the better.

The Cat’s out there dancing with two of the skutters. She hesitates to call what Kryten is doing ‘dancing’, but at least he’s trying. Dave’s hurling himself around them with all the grace of a – of a very drunk man. Rimmer’s sipping his third or fourth drink but is sitting at a table rather than making an idiot of himself on the dance floor.

Kochanski herself is sitting on a bar stool, nursing her second screwdriver. She’s only drinking screwdrivers because she didn’t quite get her first cosmopolitan right, and while the Slippery Nipple was alright she couldn’t handle the comments Dave kept making. She feels pleasantly buzzed, enough not to mind that he’s hijacked the jukebox and has dug out the least recognisable cacophony of sound she’s ever heard.

He runs out of lager at that moment and staggers off the dance floor to lean against the bar beside her, grinning wider than anyone really should be capable of. ‘Ey, Kris! D’you want to come and dance?’

‘No, Dave. You go have fun.’

He gives her one of his patented wounded-puppy looks. ‘I’ll have more fun if you come and dance with me...’ He’s leaning against her rather than the bar now, and she pulls away, almost overwhelmed by the fumes on his breath. He’s got no sense of moderation.

‘I said _no_.’

The next few things happen all at once: he leans in towards her again, one hand reaching for her; she puts her own hands up between them, about to push him away; and then Rimmer’s got Lister by the collar, has yanked him around and punched him square on the point of his jaw, snapping his head back.

Kochanski shrieks with surprise. Rimmer yelps in pain, stepping back and rubbing his hand hard. Lister just falls back against the bar, eyes rolling back in his head, and then slides ungracefully to the floor.

So much for celebrating.

* * *

Rimmer’s sick of the medi-bay. At least this time he’s not the one who’s out cold. He does have one of the ice packs wrapped around his hand, although it’s just sore as hell rather than broken like he’d initially thought.

He’s only still sitting here because Kochanski’s having trouble waking Lister up. Seems like Lister hit the back of his head against the bar on his way down. He’s breathing fine, though, and at last Kochanski gives up and leaves him to Kryten, who’s fluttering around like a distressed old hen, and the Cat, who’s moderately concerned that his partying buddy is down for the count.

She doesn’t look too steady on her feet, and so when she finally sighs and gives Kryten an _okay, your turn_ look and walks out of the medi-bay without saying anything else, he abandons his ice-pack and goes after her. Kryten doesn’t seem to notice, but then he did just punch Kryten’s precious ickle baby Listy in the face, so he’s been elevated to Public Enemy #1 and will probably find a horse’s head in his bunk the next time Kryten changes the sheets.

She’s stopped a few yards down the corridor, head down, one hand against the wall. Rimmer catches up with her and, none too steady himself, puts an arm around her; she flinches but then leans into him for support, her arm going around his waist, and they start shuffling down the corridor.

‘He only wanted to _dance_,’ she says about twenty yards later.

‘I know.’ She has already told him this. Five times.

‘I know you know.’ They make it another fifty yards before she adds, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘Letting everyone get this drunk in the first place.’ The slur to her words is subtle but there – _thish_, _firsht_, _plashe_. He knows how she feels; his own tongue’s thick in his mouth and he can feel an incipient headache building behind his eyes. They’ll all be back at the medi-bay in the morning for a hangover cure, he guesses.

‘It’s not your fault.’ They turn the corner to the sleeping quarters corridor, passing Lister’s empty room. ‘You weren’t to know he’d go overboard.’

Kochanski lets out a derisive laugh. ‘When does Dave ever _not_ go overboard?’

‘True,’ Rimmer admits.

She changes tack so fast that if they were on a boat the boom would’ve swung round and clocked him one. It sort of feels like that’s what happened anyway because what she says is, ‘Did you know I knew you kept my knickers?’

He struggles with speech for a moment and finally manages an eloquent, ‘What?’

‘Found ‘em under your pillow.’ She gives him a look that, despite the bleariness of her blue eyes, is surprisingly sly. ‘Now why’d you do that?’

The truth is because he’s fast approaching thirty-two and it was the second closest thing to sex he’d ever had and he was stupid enough to actually keep them instead of just teasing her, doubly stupid because if Ackerman had turned them up during an inspection he’d’ve been the laughingstock of the entire Brig no matter what explanation he tried to offer.

He’s apparently taking too long trying to pick a lie to tell because she gives him another look; this one has a hell of a lot more mischief to it. ‘I _order_ you to tell me.’

‘What? No! That’s not fair!’ Rimmer tries to fold his arms but one of them’s still around her so he can’t; he just pulls her a little closer to him, which knocks him off balance enough that he ends up with his back against the wall and _her_ against his front, leaning into him, her head resting against his shoulder and her arm still around his waist and all of a sudden he’s got a noseful of her hair and she’s looking up at him and _giggling_.

‘Oops, sorry,’ she says, although exactly what she’s apologising for this time’s not so clear. She kind of sags against him. ‘When did we install a spinning corridor?’

‘It’s not spinning, you’re just drunk, Kris.’

‘Don’t “Kris” me.’ She gives him a belligerent glare. The array of emotions this woman can convey using only her eyes and occasionally a well-raised eyebrow is just incredible; he’s shocked to realise how many of them he can recognise, he didn’t think he’d spent _that_ much time studying her.

‘Fine.’ It takes him a second or two to assemble the right words in the right order and say them without mixing them up. ‘You’re just drunk, Captain Kochanski, ma’am.’

‘That’s better!’ _Thatsh_. She deftly pulls free of him, only reinforcing the fact that she would have been perfectly capable of defending herself in the club had Lister been doing anything more than just annoying her, and slaps her hand against the door lock to her room. ‘A little respect’ll get you a long way in the Space Corps,’ she says over her shoulder.

And then Rimmer’s left facing – well, leaning beside – a closed door.

Same old, same smegging old.

* * *

Dave doesn’t stop talking to her after the club incident, but he’s a little more reserved. He thanks her for the hangover cure when she goes up there and finds him awake in the morning, her own head pounding like a ridiculously long drum solo. He thanks her for breakfast when she brings it, and mildly scolds Kryten for chucking a wobbly when he finds out. When she excuses herself to go and start assigning areas of the ship for them to close down nonessential circuits and equipment, he stops her and thanks her for bringing him up to the medi-bay.

‘Rimmer did most of the heavy lifting,’ she says, pausing in the doorway. ‘You should thank him.’

Lister grimaces. ‘He’s the one who hit me in the first place.’ The unimpressed expression fades into a smile. ‘At least he doesn’t hit as hard as you do.’

‘Oh, shush,’ she tells him, and leaves. She passes Rimmer on her way out and almost turns straight back around to make sure nobody’s going to start anything, but all she can hear is Rimmer complaining about the malevolent gnomes in his skull and Lister offering him a shot of the hangover cure, so maybe they’ve had enough of beating up on each other and she can get some work done without worrying about them.

Holly’s divided a map of the ship into a lot of oddly-shaped sections; rather than just splitting everything up into neat little chunks by physical location, he’s got sections marked out in relation to how they work with one another, so that the crew (such as it is) can follow logical paths of power, to switch off central circuits rather than going room by room and turning everything off. Kochanski’s glad of this; after visiting Floor 13, she doesn’t really want to go through each office, each set of sleeping quarters, each workstation, each personal area and see what the panicked horde left behind on their run for the ‘_bugs_. It’d be like wandering around on the _Titanic_, seeing what got left in the staterooms.

She does run into a slight hitch, in that they can’t all just go their own ways. No, that would make this far too fast and efficient and easy. Some of the access panels require heavy lifting to get at, or climbing, and one person alone might end up in trouble that they can’t call for help from. Moreover, there are only five of them. Kryten won’t let her be alone with Lister without complaining. She doesn’t want to be alone with Kryten. Leaving Rimmer and Lister alone together is asking for one or both of them to wind up with a black eye. And the Cat’s more interested in learning to pilot the big ship.

At least this last is somewhat hopeful, since she can remember a time when he would have happily gone off on the switching off expedition only to find somewhere warm to snooze. He’s matured a lot, even in this universe.

In the end she leaves him with Holly to make a start on learning the controls and sends Kryten and Lister off in one direction with half the map. ‘Don’t worry if you can’t get it all done today. There are only twelve or so major switches you need to find, but they’re all over the place and it could take a while. And don’t _rush_,’ she adds when Lister opens his mouth.

‘I wasn’t gonna say that. I was gonna ask how long you think “a while” might be.’

Kochanski shrugs. ‘Couple of days, maybe? Look, just camp out in anyone’s quarters, nobody’s around to mind.’

He gives her a really odd look, one that she’s never seen from him before, but he doesn’t say anything else, and he even takes the pack full of supplies – they can get food from any vending machine but she’s packed things like a torch and a toolkit and water bottles and a couple of changes of clothes (yet another reason not to send the Cat) – without digging through it and complaining about the lack of lager. (She does, however, hear him make a comment to Kryten about how low he’s running on cigarettes, and privately thinks _Well, good, because I can do head wounds and hangovers but lung cancer’s a _bit_ beyond me_.)

Rimmer shoulders the other pack – she doesn’t even have to ask – and they head out the other way, the Cat tossing a streamer as they go. ‘Good luck, guys,’ he calls after them, and Holly chimes in with, ‘Just call if you need anything.’

 

The easiest way to do this, she’s already decided, is to start at the bottom level that they have to go to and work their way back up. The lower cargo bays don’t need to be well-lit any more; Holly’s worked out which switches control the circuits for the lights and which control the giant refrigeration units so they don’t get anything wrong, but Kochanski intends to check before she touches anything. Before they get there, though, there’s a long journey down in the Xpress Lift to contend with.

Rimmer groans when he realises. ‘Oh, not this smegging thing, this takes forever to get anywhere.’

‘You’re whinging, stop it, or I’ll make you walk.’ Kochanski holds the door for him and they settle opposite each other. The seats are comfortable to start with but she’s sure they’ll be horrid after three hours. The in-lift video starts and she hits the override; Rimmer looks faintly impressed but doesn’t comment as the lift gets moving without any nonsense about cyanide capsules.

She’s really impressed at herself for that matter. She’s managed to be in his presence for a good half an hour so far without apologising for being drunk at him last night, which would probably undermine her even more so than being drunk at him in the first place. Maybe she can make it through this journey without making herself look like an idiot, and of course once everything’s working and they’re Earth-bound she’ll have really solidified her role as Captain of this band of misfits.

Captain. Ha. She’s Captain over one neurotic mechanoid, a Cat, an alternate version of her boyfriend, and the man currently sitting opposite her looking like he not only sucked on a lemon, but swallowed it. Somehow she doesn’t think this is what her parents had in mind for her when they started her out at Cyberschool. Not that they’ll ever know now, of course. She’s far too far from them now for them to ever know.

‘What’s wrong?’ Rimmer makes a funny noise at the end of the sentence like he’s trying to work out whether to call her ‘ma’am’ or ‘Kochanski’ or ‘Captain’ and ends up settling on nothing.

‘Nothing.’

‘You looked... upset.’

‘I’m _fine_,’ she snaps, and he not only doesn’t back off but actually looks smug.

‘That’s what you women always say when you’re not actually fine.’

‘Oh, what would you know?’

_Shit_. The words are out and she wishes she could unsay them. He looks as though she’s just slapped him across the face, and he draws his feet up onto the seat, wrapping his arms around his knees in a too obviously defensive posture. She’s briefly surprised that he’s not speaking up in his own defence as well; she’s overheard enough conversations between him and Dave to know that he’d rather lie or at least exaggerate than tell the truth. Mind you, the only reason she knows the truth is from one brief conversation with Yvonne McGruder at an officers’ do, and McGruder was too busy trying to nag her into joining the boxing team to really give her the nitty-gritty.

 

(‘Isn’t Lister your boyfriend?’

‘No, not any more.’

‘Oh, right. Canapé? I saw you at the gym yesterday. Ever thought about taking up boxing? You’re brutal at that jujitsu stuff, I bet your footwork’d be amazing.’

‘Not really, no. Um, Yvonne?’

‘What?’

‘Rumour has it you slept with Rimmer. You know. Dav-- Lister’s bunkmate.’

‘Is _that_ what his name was?’ And she’d eaten the offered canapé herself. ‘The only bit I remember’s the pizza. And how crap it was. The sex, not the pizza. The pizza was actually pretty good. Not like these bloody pastry things.’

She’d asked in spite of herself, ‘How crap?’

‘Oh, you know. First time around the block crap. Enthusiastic, though.’ She’d licked pastry crumbs off her lip and for a second looked vaguely wistful.

‘Right, okay,’ Kochanski had said, and then Yvonne had started in again on the crossover between martial arts and boxing and made her promise to come and at least watch a sparring session, and then two days later she’d been dead so it hadn’t mattered any more anyway.)

 

‘I apologise. That was uncalled for.’

‘It’s not as if I haven’t heard it all before,’ Rimmer says with a sigh, but he doesn’t uncurl from his little ball, just gives her a weary look over his knees.

‘Still, it was unprofessional of me.’

‘Are you ever going to stop pretending you’re just the Captain and not our friend as well? Our fellow former prisoner and Canaries teammate?’ He laces his fingers together and literally starts twiddling his thumbs. ‘Kris, I know it’s important to you to get the ship going again, but is it worth running yourself into the ground considering that you told me you’re not even sure we’ll get back to Earth?’

‘I’ve got to _try_,’ she says a little snappishly. ‘Otherwise we’re all going to just get depressed. Especially Dave.’

‘Give him some credit. He did manage for years. He’s told me a lot about it. Mostly so he could point out all the ways I fail compared to “his” Rimmer.’ Rimmer sighs again and runs one hand through his hair, making it stick out messily. ‘His Rimmer who went off to become some sort of superhero.’

‘He... what?’ Kochanski raises both eyebrows. ‘His Rimmer _died_. He was killed by a – a knight – out of the AR – he –’ It sounds so stupid now that she’s saying it out loud. Why did she ever believe that story?

Rimmer’s just waiting for her to finish, but since she’s not making any more sense, he jumps in with, ‘That’s what he told  everyone. He told _me_ that his Rimmer went off to become the new “Ace Rimmer”. He made a point of saying that if it hadn’t been for all that time in space fending for themselves, the other me would never have had the bravery to do it. Lister’s changed too. I didn’t believe the whole story when he first explained it to me, but it came to make sense.’ He’s twiddling his thumbs again. ‘All I’m saying is, he might get on my nerves a bit—’

‘Might!’

‘—but he’s got a hell of a lot of optimism still. Don’t think that just because he’s not “your” Dave he’s totally useless. He’s not.’

Kochanski shakes her head slowly, wonderingly. ‘I never thought I’d ever hear you say that.’

Rimmer just gives her a half-hearted smile. ‘Just don’t _tell_ him I said that.’


	6. Chapter 6

An hour later Kochanski is napping, awkwardly stretched out across the seats, one arm dangling over the side, the other in use as a pillow. Rimmer’s too tall to stretch out so he’s just sitting with his back against the wall and his legs up on the seat. He’s drowsing, but not so deeply that he doesn’t hear her the first time that she lets out a little scared noise in her sleep.

‘Kochanski?’

The hand hanging down twitches, and she makes the noise again; it’s got a definite negatory tone to it, like she’s trying to say no to someone, or something. Rimmer gets up, wincing at the pain in his lower back, and kneels beside her makeshift bed. He takes her hand in his and rubs the back of it lightly.

‘Kris... Kris, wake up.’

She rises to wakefulness slowly, blinking at him, looking around for a moment, and then sliding off the seats onto her knees on the carpeted floor, clinging to him, her arms going around his waist and her head resting against his chest. She’s shaking like a little red autumn leaf about to be blown off the tree, and he puts his arms around her and just holds her, not knowing what else to do.

‘Were you having a nightmare?’ he asks.

She just nods her head against his chest and he tightens his arms around her. The hiccuppy quality to her breathing makes him pretty sure she’s on the verge of crying again.

‘Whatever it was, it wasn’t real. You’re awake now. It’s all right. Well, it’s all right considering we’re still in the stupid lift and we’re only halfway,’ he amends, and this makes her laugh, a little shaky laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not normally like this.’ She squeezes him a little. ‘I didn’t mean to make you worry.’

‘What were you dreaming about?’

‘I dreamt everyone was dead and it was just me. _Everyone_,’ she emphasises. ‘Dave, you, Cat... even Kryten. I was walking around the ship looking for you all and trying to get Holly to answer me and even he wouldn’t answer me.’

‘Oh Kris, that’s awful.’

This time she doesn’t rebuke him for the use of her first name. She just nods again. Rimmer raises one hand tentatively and starts stroking her hair, and she manages another sort-of laugh.

‘I thought – with what happened with Cassandra and everything, I thought you’d be, um. Sleazier than this. You’re a good friend after all.’

Oh, _smeg_. She’s relegated him to the friend zone. This is something he knows about thanks to Lister bemoaning his own position in it. The _I-like-you-but_ zone. The _I-value-your-friendship_ zone. The _this-won’t-work-out_ zone.

‘Thanks,’ is all he says out loud, and it comes out sarcastically, thanks to his thoughts.

‘No, I mean it, Arnold, you are.’

Well. Um. All right. ‘Arnold’ to rhyme with ‘friend’ is a damn sight better than ‘Rimmer’ to rhyme with ‘scum’. He settles back on his heels and she leans against him and sighs; he’s not particularly comfortable but, as long as her arms are wound around his waist and her head’s against his chest, he doesn’t care how long he stays here.

‘My foot’s going to sleep,’ she says about two minutes later, and she disentangles herself and stands up, stretching and wincing, and he moves straight up onto the seat to sit and rub his own leg, because staying hunched over is the best way he can hide his arousal. Kochanski crosses the lift to dig through a side pocket of the pack and for a second he thinks she’s going to settle over there, but instead she comes and sits back down beside him and offers him a chocolate bar, with a little guilty grin on her face.

‘That doesn’t look like the bare essentials to me,’ he says. ‘I thought you told us we’d be eating out of the machines.’

‘I didn’t want to risk that they might be broken down considering the ship’s best technicians were in the Brig,’ she says, pushing his chocolate into his hand and unwrapping her own. ‘Oh, hell.’ It’s partly melted and her tongue darts out to lick a smear of it off her hand and Rimmer has to tear into his chocolate and start eating it so he doesn’t make any untoward agonised noises at the sight.

‘A Shift were nowhere near the Brig,’ he says, swallowing a mouthful of chocolate.

‘Oh, come on. You guys were the ones who did all the worst jobs—’

‘—thank you ever so much for reminding me—’

‘—and the thing is that if you didn’t, the ship really _would_ be in trouble.’ She bites off another square of chocolate and sucks on it thoughtfully, rolling her eyes at him. This time he barely notices her eyes; he’s too busy looking at her mouth and trying to pretend he isn’t. He looks away but his eyes are inexorably drawn back to her. He’s going to have an entertaining time trying to stand up when the lift stops without needing a bucket of cold water.

‘So you’re saying we were essential to the ship?’

‘You know you were! You still are!’ She gestures with her chocolate bar, tucking the bit in her mouth into her cheek so she can talk. When Lister talks with his mouth full it’s disgusting. When Kris does it it’s just sort of endearing. If the Love Celibates could read his mind right now he’d be kicked out for life. ‘Do you think I could get all of this happening without you?’

‘I can’t see how we’ve been much help,’ Rimmer says. ‘I didn’t realise punching each other  out every so often was a useful contribution.’

‘You know there’s more to it than that.’

‘There is?’

She gives him an admirably subdued glare. ‘Don’t you think there’s a _reason_ my nightmare was about being left alone? It was the same when we ran into the Despair Squid.’

‘You met one of those too? Lister told me about that.’

‘Yes, in my own dimension of course. It made me think that I’d never left Earth, that my career was all my imagination, and that I was living on the street in Glasgow because my family were all dead and none of my friends wanted to know me. And Dave – my Dave – came along one day  and didn’t even recognise me no matter what I said.’ She’s so upset she accidentally swallows her chocolate and gasps for air for a moment; Rimmer puts a steadying hand on her back and she slumps sideways until she’s lying on her back, head on his thigh, looking up at him with her feet against the wall. ‘I can’t stand the thought of being alone,’ she finishes.

If he’s going to be in the friend zone he wishes she wouldn’t be so touchy-feely about it. The top of her head’s about two inches, if that, away from his cock and he’s still hard, and paranoid that she’ll notice. But either she doesn’t notice or doesn’t comment. She certainly doesn’t leap away in revulsion, which is what he was most afraid of.

‘All I ever wanted when I was growing up was to not have a family at all,’ he says. ‘Or to have a different family. At the very least it would’ve been nice to – I don’t know, to not be the youngest. To not be the _target_.’

‘Mmmm, I felt the same way sometimes. But Moose didn’t tease me very much. Not as much as your brothers.’ She apparently sees the surprise on his face because she adds, ‘Dave told me.’

‘Which Dave? Your Dave?’

‘No, our Dave. This Dave.’ She flaps her hand, nearly drops her chocolate. ‘Whoever. When we were on _Starbug_, before we got back here. He’d had this dream about you and I thought we’d resolved it all but he had it a couple more times and so we talked about you a lot.’

Rimmer decides to ignore the fact that it wasn’t really _him_ they’d talked about. ‘Wait a minute. What sort of dream needs _resolving_?’

He can see the hesitation on her face, tempered with consideration; she takes a long time to answer. ‘Just about how he missed you after you – oh, you know, the _other_ you – went off to become Ace. Except of course he was still telling everyone that you’d died, so I didn’t think he had any chance of ever seeing you again. He was really rather fond of you, you know.’ She pauses and then adds, ‘But don’t tell him I said that.’

There’s clearly something more to this that she’s not telling him, but he just manages to smile down at her and then eat some more of his chocolate. She’s going through hers at a rate of knots and eyeing the bar in his hand with a covetousness he wishes she’d look at him with. He moves his hand out of her reach. ‘My chocolate, Captain.’

‘I could order you to hand it over,’ she says, licking the empty wrapper of her own bar and then stuffing it into her pocket. Why do combat trousers look so good on her and so sloppy on Lister? The world may never know, aside from the simple fact that she’d look good in a sack and the only way Lister would look good in a sack is if it were over his head.

‘That really wouldn’t be fair.’

‘But you’re eating it so slowly.’

Rimmer bites off a tiny corner of the next square, raising an eyebrow at her, and Kochanski makes a frustrated noise at him and _pounces_ – she rolls until she’s on her knees, a feat probably made possible only through her martial arts training, and lunges across him – and she starts out laughing because it’s just a game but then she lands on his lap and he can feel her pressing against him and short of pretending to have a bazookoid in his pocket there’s no explaining this away.

* * *

Five minutes earlier she was telling him how good a friend he was and he’d agreed. Now she’s straddling his lap and has his chocolate-bearing hand pinned to the lift wall and she can feel how aroused he is even though she’s hovering, not pressed right against him, and his face has gone pink with the exertion of trying to keep her off the chocolate and with something else, something that turns the pink to red as he looks to where her hand is locked around his wrist. Something that makes his eyes go darker, and his breathing quicken, and his pulse race.

She balances there a moment too long trying to decide between throwing herself backwards or sideways and her thigh muscles give out. _Now_ she’s really pressed against him, and she can feel her own face going gradually pinker. Rimmer looks down and gets an eyeful of her cleavage; his gaze bounces back to her face and then down again and away and he just looks so stupidly awkward—

‘Sorry. I – sorry.’

—just like Dave when she’d first seen him at the Copa, sidling and shy and trying to find his voice to ask her out—

‘It’s all right.’

—that suddenly she’s kissing him like she temporarily wanted to when he’d taken the sexual magnetism virus, his lips surprised under hers, his whole body tensing up, and she gives herself a resounding metaphorical smack upside the head and pulls away.

This time it’s she who says, ‘Sorry,’ and he who _doesn’t_ say, ‘It’s all right,’ but instead lifts one hand like a dreaming man, or a drowning one, and pushes her hair back from her face, fingers running through the loose tangles, and then pulls her back down to him.

Dave kisses the way he eats, all tongue and lips and wet enthusiasm. Rimmer kisses like he’s waiting for something, cautious and slow, and Kochanski realises that what he’s waiting for is her to take the lead, which sends an unexpected hot rush of desire through her. She’s used to men who know exactly what they’re doing, what they want to do, and how much effort they have to put in to get what they want. Rimmer’s _tabula rasa_ by comparison.

He tries to move the hand she’s got pinned and she reflexively tightens her grip and he makes a surprised noise and arches up against her, and she takes her mouth off his long enough to say, ‘Don’t move,’ before she kisses him again. His eyes are shut tight; she closes her own eyes so she can concentrate. She runs her tongue over his lower lip and his tongue comes out to meet it; he’s so tentative it’s almost annoying. But the more she pushes him, the more he responds. To the kiss, anyway. He’s having trouble being obedient to the order not to move; she can feel him shifting under her a little, but he keeps stopping like he keeps remembering that he’s not supposed to be doing that.

It’s quite possibly one of the most erotic things she’s ever experienced.

The kiss finally breaks; when she opens her eyes he’s looking at her, startled and stunned and aroused all at once. She’s not mentally comparing him to Dave any more; he’s just himself, just Rimmer, a new start, a nearly blank slate.

For a moment she remembers the rose and the gardens and Dave kissing her and feels guilty. But then Rimmer – Arnold, they’re a bit past surnames at this point – whispers plaintively, ‘Don’t stop now, Kris, _please_,’ and she just locks those thoughts away to kiss him again.

‘What the hell are we doing?’ she says against his lips.

‘I don’t know. Whatever you want.’ His voice is gasping, rough, not quite working properly.

Her eyes go to the spot where his beige uniform shirt is pulled tight against his well-muscled upper arm because she’s got his hand pinned higher up on the wall, and she wonders why he’s still bothering with uniform; none of the rest of them do. Maybe it’s an attempt to cling to the familiar, the known, when so much else about their world has changed. Well, if that’s what it is, too bad, because her free hand goes to his top shirt button and opens it; another step into the unknown. At the same time she slides his hand down the wall to rest by his side and just wraps her fingers tight around his wrist instead; his pulse jumps at that.

‘You like me pushing you around, don’t you.’ It’s a statement more than a question but he nods anyway, that blush staining his cheeks again. She undoes the next button down. ‘I didn’t know you were experienced enough to have made up your mind about anything like that.’

‘I’m not. It’s just – I just know.’

She undoes the third button; there’s now a V of skin showing where she’s pulled his shirt open and she bends her head and kisses the hollow between his collarbones, and he gasps and pushes up against her: against her mouth and against where she’s not quite pressing down on his lap.

‘I thought I told you not to move.’ She’s testing him now.

He goes an even deeper shade of red and ducks his head and mumbles, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

She loses control. She doesn’t care that this is undoubtedly going to have repercussions unless she can persuade him that what happens in the Xpress Lift stays in the Xpress Lift. She just grabs a handful of his shirt and yanks it the rest of the way open, and he yelps with surprise and then makes a strangled lustful noise when she moves against him and kisses him again. She can feel how tense he’s going from not being allowed to move and, for her own sake as much as his, pulls away enough to say, ‘You can touch me now.’

* * *

He’s only got one free hand but he makes the most of it, pulling at her tight red t-shirt where it’s tucked into the waistband of her black combat trousers, pulling it free so he can get his hand up under it before she can revoke her invitation. He can only assume she’s gone space crazy and if she has he’s going to make the most of it before she comes to her senses. Hell, maybe they’re back in the psychotropic courtroom, as it were, and this is all just his imagination.

He doesn’t think his imagination could conjure up the way her mouth still tastes of chocolate, or the exact way she’s pressed against him, not flinching away from his arousal, or the way her breathing is making her breasts move. He pulls up on the hem of her t-shirt and she takes pity on him and pulls it off over her head. She’s wearing a plain white cotton bra under it but for some reason it’s more erotic than any concoction of satin and lace he could think up on his own. Because it’s real, and it’s hers, and oh god she’s taking it _off_, letting go of his hand at last so she can pop the hooks free and cast it aside.

That does it. He’s got to be imagining this. There’s just no way Kristine Kochanski’s sitting topless in his lap, leaning in to press her bare breasts against his bare chest, and kissing him again, her mouth moving from his to kiss along his jawline and then nip at his earlobe. There’s no way he’s settling his hands on her waist, savouring the feeling of her smooth warm skin under his fingertips before tentatively running his hands  up her sides, and definitely no way that she’s backing off enough to give him room to finally cup her breasts in his hands. He’s trying not to be too rough or anything but he squeezes a little too hard and she makes a little sound of protest.

‘Sorry, sorry.’

‘Just be careful.’ She sets one of her hands on his chest and digs her short fingernails in a little. ‘I can be rougher with you than you can be with me.’

‘Please do.’ Oh god, it’s the most daring thing he’s ever said to a woman but she actually smiles in response and scrapes her nails right down as far as his navel and he feels a sharp tingling burst of pleasure spread out from the path they take. He closes his eyes for a second to enjoy it more and then opens them in a hurry, suddenly irrationally afraid that he’ll open his eyes and this all _will_ have been his imagination.

It’s not. She’s still there, and he buries his face against the side of her neck with relief, and then presses his lips to her skin, and she shivers at that so he kisses harder.

‘Careful – don’t mark me.’

He pulls back and inspects her skin; it’s a little reddened but he hasn’t marked her, and he kisses down a little further and the red’s just the flush of desire following his mouth; he can feel her skin getting more heated. He keeps going, down to where he can take her nipple carefully into his mouth and roll his tongue around it, and she makes an inarticulate little noise.

‘Is that good?’ he asks.

‘If you stop now I’ll have you court-martialled.’

He takes that as a yes and bends his head to her breast again, seeking her other breast with one hand, mimicking the movement of his tongue with the caress of his thumb across her nipple, and the noise she makes this time is unmistakably one of pleasure. She rubs hard against him and he groans around his mouthful; if she keeps this up he’s going to come in his pants.

She gets one hand in between them and it takes him a second to place the movements, but when he does he’d fall over if not for the fact that they’re sitting down. She’s yanking at her own belt and button and zip, wriggling to try and get her trousers off, and bright sparks burst in his head at the sight, not to mention the delicious feeling of her moving against him. Finally she gives up and pulls right off him to stand up, leaving him there breathing hard, his shirt hanging open and the front of his own trousers tented rather obviously. Not for long though; he stands up as well, shrugging the shirt off (it joins hers on the floor) and moves to help her, dropping to one knee in front of her and helping her get the thick black fabric down, pulling her shoes off and tossing them out of the way. She’s wearing a black g-string of a decidedly thinner fabric underneath it and that comes off as well; she lifts first one foot and then the other and he pulls the clothing off and it joins the growing heap in the corner.

He doesn’t move to get up right away. No. He can smell the dark private woman-scent of her, and presses a kiss to her thigh, nervous all over again.

‘Let me sit down.’ Her voice is shaky as well but she steps around him and settles back on the cushioned seat, at the edge of it, her knees apart so he can turn and see her. She’s biting her lip lightly and her hands rest on her thighs. ‘Come here.’

He goes to her, on both knees now, and she closes her eyes briefly when he looks up at her, although he doesn’t quite know why. He kisses her thigh again, and then a little further in, and she moves one hand to tangle in his hair, pulling lightly but insistently.

‘I haven’t – Kris, I don’t want to hurt you or – or _bore_ you—’

Incredibly, she laughs at that. ‘I’ll let you know if you’re doing anything wrong.’

_Well_. He’s determined to not have that happen. Even if this _is_ territory he and McGruder never quite covered in their glorious twelve minutes together. He’s not totally stupid. Well, all right, he is, but he’s willing to learn, to take direction from her. He kisses her inner thigh again, and then touches her lightly with one hand, parting her soft brown curls to find her centre, and she lets out a gasp even at that little touch. He licks his lips nervously, and then licks _her_ nervously, tongue trembling against her.

She tastes good. Not that he really has any basis for comparison, but she tastes good; not overpowering or bad at all, the way he’s heard some men complain about their women. She just tastes like – like _Kris_. He runs his tongue over her again, feeling her fingers knot tighter into his hair. Feels like she’s about half a second short of shoving his face right in and the thought of that, of her taking control like that, sends a dark pulse of desire straight to his cock.

She starts making little needy noises and he redoubles his efforts. He’s not totally oblivious to how this works, even if his experience is more theoretical than practical, and he knows when he’s found her clit because she lets out a soft cry and really does push in with the hand on his head and he feels like his brain’s been electrocuted. He’s never done this before but somehow it feels like he’s meant to be here, like he’s been waiting for some woman to step in and take control over him like this.

Then she’s arching up against his mouth and – _god_. Okay,  _whoa_. Even if he’d gotten McGruder off, which he hadn’t (as he now realises ashamedly), it hadn’t been this up close and personal. She feels so hot and wet and she’s making the most amazing noises in the back of her throat and all he can do is keep his mouth pressed against her because he wants to feel this.

At last she tugs lightly on his hair, pulling him back; he looks up at her and she stares wide-eyed back; her hair’s a mess, her chest is heaving, and her mouth is hanging open a little. She pulls a little more insistently on his hair and he stands up and she’s obviously not quite as out of it as she looks because she gets his belt buckle undone one-handed and is starting on the button when he pushes her hand away and does it himself, toeing off his shoes at the same time.

* * *

She can barely think straight, but enough to think of the first-aid kit stashed in the backpack, and enough to remember that it’s one of the survival ones used for first contact on new planets. The stockists always put condoms in those, citing as a reason the fact that they can be used as water bags in a pinch, but everyone knows that the real reason is that first contact crews have a tendency to informally claim the new territory in the name of the JMC by having sex on it once they’ve planted the flag.

He’s naked when she turns back from the backpack, little packet in hand, and for a second he shies away from her appraising glance. He’s got nothing at all to be ashamed of, though, and she moves back to him and slips her arms around his waist; his erection nudges hard against her and she rubs against it and he lets out a strangled moan.

‘Please, Kris...’

‘Please what?’

‘I want you.’

For a second she contemplates teasing him further but she wants this as well and so she just gives him a little shove so that he stumbles back, and he takes the hint and sits down. She doesn’t waste any time in getting the condom onto him (god knows if she left it up to him he’d probably have little to no idea) and then straddles his thighs, leaning in to kiss him again as she sinks down onto him.

_Oh_. She’d almost forgotten just how good this could feel. He’s not as big as Dave but he still does a pretty damn good job of filling her up, especially at this angle. For his part he gasps so loudly when he slips inside her that if she didn’t know better she’d think this was his first time ever. She supposes it might as well be. For some reason that thought is really enticing. She’s never been anyone’s first or almost-first before, and for a moment she wishes that this’d happened somewhere more comfortable than the bench seat of the Xpress Lift.

He doesn’t seem to mind in the slightest though. He’s clinging hard to her backside, fingers digging in almost painfully, breathing fast and shallow, his eyes squinched shut, and there’s no way this is going to last all that long but she’ll take what she can get.

She tightens her arms around his neck, nails leaving little marks in the skin of his back, and he whimpers when she does it so she scratches quite deliberately across the back of his shoulders and he moans and pulls her hard against him and she feels the slow hard pulse of him inside her. The face he pulls makes him look as though he’s just been hit over the head with a welding mallet, but she doesn’t laugh; can’t, in fact, because then he buries his face against the side of her neck and she can hear him whispering her name over and over like a secret mantra.

And right then is when the lift grinds to a halt and a cool female voice announces that they’ve reached their destination.


	7. Chapter 7

Rimmer lets Kochanski take over the business of dragging him to his feet and leading him out of the lift to what must surely be the world’s smallest sleeping quarters. One single bunk, one table, one chair, one door into the bathroom, which she goes straight into, shutting the door behind herself with a quick, apologetic smile. One automated waste disposal unit, which is useful for getting rid of the condom. He gets as far as pulling his shirt back on but not buttoning it and then has to lie down on the bunk because his head’s spinning so much.

She’s only in the bathroom a minute or so, not long enough to make an escape out of the window (if, for some unlikely reason, there had been a window down here), and when she comes out she moves straight away to lie with him; it’s really tight quarters but he doesn’t at all mind scooting over and opening his arms to her. She curls up against him like it’s the most natural thing in the world for the two of them to be snuggled up together on a bunk in the bottom of the cargo bay area after having sex in a lift.

If this is what passes for normal in their lives now, he’s all for it.

‘That was... incredible,’ he says at last.

She laughs, sounding a bit embarrassed. ‘Thank you.’

‘So... what now? Where do we go from here?’

She’s silent for a long while, until he starts quietly panicking that now she’s had time to think about their situation she’s going to go and _make_ a window to crawl out of.

‘We finish what we came to do,’ she says eventually. ‘We try not to get _too_ distracted along the way, and between the two of us we come up with something to tell Dave about us.’

He can feel a big stupid grin spreading over his face. ‘About us? So there is an us?’

She gives him a pointed little glare and a jab in the ribs for good measure. ‘Surely you don’t think I hop into bed with just anyone, do you?’

His arms tighten around her. ‘I should hope not.’

 

They manage to make it from switch to switch without too many delays along the way. She’s really very focused on this project and he gets caught up in her enthusiasm, her desire to get the ship running faster and better. He admires her ability to work out all of the potential, especially considering that she has to work with Holly to do it and he still doesn’t think much of Holly’s cognitive abilities. But then that’s a little unfair considering his own somewhat lacking ability to even come close to her ideas.

She explains things along the way, though. In fact it’s like some sort of floodgate’s opened and she talks almost nonstop about her plans. He can tell she’s dumbing it down for him and rather than complaining, he actually enjoys it. For the first time the principles she’s talking about are starting to make sense. He does have to ask her to repeat some concepts a few times but they stick much better than anything he’s ever read out of a textbook.

And when the day’s work is done, two ship’s-time nights in a row, she teaches him other things. Like exactly what she likes best in bed. Like the best ways to use his lips and tongue and fingers on her before they even get anywhere near what he sees as the main point of sex. Like how to distract himself a little by thinking of something else so he won’t come too fast (actually, she doesn’t teach him this; he figures it out for himself; turns out that doing the twelve times table in his head works pretty well while not ruining the experience). Like how it feels when she goes down on him and he can only lie back and grab twin handfuls of blanket and make the same wordless whimpering moan over and over until he spills into her mouth.

It’s not enough time to learn everything she has to teach him, either about sex or about astronavigation, but it’s a start.

 

Finally, though, they have to go back. They’ve worked their way up a few floors at a time, using cargo lifts and short trip lifts, but they make the last leg of the journey in the Xpress Lift to bring them right back to their starting point. They’re only a few hours later than intended, and they keep their hands to themselves – mostly – in the lift.

‘I’ll talk to him alone,’ Kochanski says for possibly the fifth or sixth time as the lift approaches their floor. ‘Break it to him gently.’

‘I think that’s best,’ Rimmer agrees for the whateverth time. ‘I don’t fancy the idea of getting my head smacked into the floor again.’

‘You won’t, I promise.’ The lift slows and she stands up, straightening her back, smoothing down her clothes even though they’re only rumpled by virtue of having been in the bottom of the backpack, and almost imperceptibly slipping back into Captain mode. It’s something about the way she stands, one hand on her hip, the other drumming lightly against her thigh, waiting for the lift door to open; he can tell she’s shoring herself up for the impending conversation.

‘Just – Kris, just remember he really has no idea about this and he’s going to think everything’s normal. Let him down carefully.’ He’s never been in Lister’s position, but he does feel guilty about this. Guilty because even if he wanted it to happen, now that it _is_ happening he’s uncomfortably aware that it’s going to be the second time Kochanski’s left Lister for someone else. Even if they’re not exactly together this time. Damn it, this is _not_ his fault. She came to _him_, she kissed _him_, and this is the worst time ever to have a fit of morals because the lift door is opening, and – oh _hell_.

* * *

Dave’s waiting for them, leaning against the wall opposite the lift, slumped as though he’s been waiting for quite a while. He lifts his head and there’s the most awful look of resignation in his eyes that Kochanski’s ever seen.

‘Hey.’ He sounds like he’s been crying. As she steps out of the lift and gets closer she realises he _has_ been crying; he’s never been good at hiding it.

‘Dave—’

‘_Don’t_. I just – Kris, Holly told me.’

_No_. She hadn’t thought Holly was paying attention to them. She’d thought he was totally focused on the ship’s systems. But then, the Xpress lift is part of the systems, and even if he didn’t make it known that he was there he might have been monitoring it to make sure they made the trip safely, and—

She lifts one hand, reaches out for him, and he pulls away and just _runs_, outright bolting down the corridor towards the sleeping quarters, hair flying out behind him. She’d no idea he could run so fast, and she starts after him, and then Rimmer’s overtaking her, there’s a thud as the backpack hits the ground and he’s chasing after Lister as fast as he can manage. _Shit_. She can’t imagine any way this is going to end except for badly, and though she’s pretty sure she physically won’t be able to stop them if they do come to blows, she chases after them anyway.

They disappear around the corner before she can catch up and she hears the chu-chung of Dave’s quarters’ door slamming shut, and then Rimmer pounding on the door.

‘Lister! Let us in!’

‘Smeg off!’

So much for breaking it to him gently.

She skids to a halt beside Rimmer and pushes him out of the way, overriding the door lock with short, angry jabs with her index finger on the keypad. She’s only angry at herself for not realising exactly how badly this would turn out. The door hisses open and Rimmer steps into the doorway to keep it from shutting again; Kochanski pushes past him into the room.

Dave’s got a look on his face like a cornered mouse, his eyes darting back and forth between them, and when she goes to put her arms around him he stiffens and tries to push her away again before abruptly giving in and almost collapsing against her shoulder. She holds him close and gives Rimmer a helpless look; Rimmer, for his part, sidles a little further into the room and stands there with his arms folded, looking completely out of his depth.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she keeps saying, not sure if it’s getting through to him. ‘I wish you hadn’t found out like this, we never meant to hurt you...’

‘_Hurt_ me? God, no, Kris, why would you ever think that?’ He’s trying so hard to sound all right and sarcastic to boot; he’s wavering closer to hysteria. ‘First you leave me for Tim, then _he_ leaves me to become Ace, now you’re _both_ leavin’ me for each other! Things couldn’t be more perfect!’

She looks over at Rimmer, who opens his mouth and says—

* * *

‘I’m sorry too. I can’t say I’m not happy.’ He hastens to find the next words. ‘But I – Lister, I’m really sorry.’

‘Like smeg you are.’ Lister glares at him from the circle of Kochanski’s arms. ‘You’re just sayin’ that so you don’t have to admit you don’t give two short smegs about me.’

Rimmer looks from one of them to the other, but mostly focuses on how Kochanski’s got her arms tight around Lister and is rubbing his back soothingly. He’s painfully certain that this is not a matter of unreciprocated feelings. She’s being too touchy-feely for that. It’s the same – it’s the same way she acts around _him_ now.

As if she’s read his mind, Kochanski lets go of Lister with one arm and holds it out to him. Rimmer goes to her uncertainly, stepping into her embrace, and when Lister stiffens and tries to pull away he automatically grabs the back of his collar, stopping him. It’s not that _he_ wants to touch the man, but Kochanski clearly wants them both close, and if she wants something then he’s bound to try and make it happen for her.

She stands there, one arm around Lister’s shoulders, the other around Rimmer’s waist, and she’s got the oddest look on her face like she’s trying to do trigonometric equations in her head, and Rimmer’s about to ask if she’s all right when she turns her head and kisses Lister’s forehead. His head lifts up off her shoulder and she kisses him square on the mouth, and then before either of them can react she turns to Rimmer and kisses _him_ on the mouth as well.

‘Kris, what—’ both of them say in unison, and she cuts them off with:

‘Given that we’re the last three humans alive and I am getting very sick of dragging one or the other of you to the medi-bay every time you fight, you two are going to have to learn to share.’


	8. Chapter 8

Forty-five minutes later she’s in her room, and she’s alone, and she’s questioning the wisdom of making such a suggestion to them. They both asked for time to think about it and she granted it; she can’t blame them. She’s been thinking about it for quite some time – mostly as another practicality because she knows that two men and one woman they both desire is a recipe for trouble at the best of times, and this is not the best of times. She’s sort of surprised that the Cat hasn’t put in a bid as well, but perhaps he’s seen enough punches being thrown that he doesn’t want to risk getting injured.

She just can’t make herself choose one of them over the other. She _can’t_. She’s tried mentally listing pros and cons. She’s tried comparing and contrasting them just based on _them_ and they’re too different and she can’t and it isn’t fair. She has a whole list of things in her head that qualify for the stupidest thing she’s ever done in her life and this has shot to number one – well, number one and two – with a bullet. She half-wishes she’d just kept her mouth to herself in the lift and half-wishes she’d never gone down into the botanical gardens and knows, somehow, that even if she’d never done either thing she’d always be wondering _what if_.

There’s nothing to be done about it now. Either they’ll say yes and she’ll have to actually figure out the logistics (and silence that tiny dark part of her that keeps suggesting she try being _with_ both of them at once; there’s no way they’ll agree to _that_), or they’ll say no and she’ll have to live with _both_ of them moping. Maybe if that happens she can try re-establishing the dimensional linkway back to her old dimension, but part of her – no, most of her – knows that that’s a remote, remote option.

The overhead light goes from dull yellowish white to dull whitish blue. Nightfall. Holly’s smarter than to actually speak to her to tell her the time at the moment. She wonders how he broke it to Dave. ‘Hey, Hol, where’re Kris and Rimmer?’ ‘They’re having sex in the Xpress Lift around about Floor 1013, Dave.’

She knows it’s not fair to try and shift any of the blame onto Holly, but she does it anyway. She supposes at least she was saved the hassle of trying to figure out exactly how to break it to Dave herself. ‘Hey, Dave, sorry we were late back, the whole thing took a little longer than expected because we kept having sex breaks.’ _God_. She wishes she’d just stayed in the Drive Room forever and never come out. Or that she’d never joined the JMC and met either of them. Or that she’d stayed in Cyberschool, where everything made sense and there weren’t any stupid emotions to deal with.

There’s still nothing to be done about it now, short of jumping ship, which she can’t do because as far as she knows every single bloody ship to surface craft has been disintegrated.

She can’t remember having gone this far off the rails since she first came out of Cyberschool and realised that reality didn’t run to a timetable, that not everything was neatly scheduled and that not everyone wore the same blank beige uniform. Part of her knows that’s why she was drawn to the JMC when she finally started getting her life back on track (and she reaches up to touch the spot on the side of her nose that hasn’t been a piercing hole for years); it offered a return to that structured normality that she liked, or if not liked, had grown used to, comfortable with.

Right now she feels like she did the first time she grabbed a handful of her own hair and cut it off with her friend Erin’s nail scissors, squinting into the dirty mirror of their Glasgow flat, deciding it didn’t matter if one side turned out shorter than the other because she could always just gel it up more. She feels like she’s taken a big first step and now her foot’s wavering in space and she’s not sure whether she’s going to land safely or fall on her face.

She hopes she won’t fall. They’re far too high up for her to fall and not be hurt.

It’s that somewhat idiotic thought that makes her realise just how tired she is, and she stretches out on her bunk and pulls her teddy bear into her arms and thinks maybe she’ll just nap for a little while, just to catch up on the sleep debt she’s been adding and adding and adding to the whole way through this project.

Time Drives and Time Wands and stasis leaks and all those things and she can’t undo this, she can’t go back now. Better to sleep on it, like she advised them both, struggling to maintain her cool in the face of Dave’s hurt-bemused gaze, in the face of Rimmer’s (she really has to start thinking of him as Arnold if this happens; it’s too odd otherwise) sudden look of fear, as if he’d been afraid she’d suddenly take back everything that happened.

Better to sleep on it, and hope that just because their faces follow her into sleep, she won’t get any more entangled in this in dreams.

* * *

Whenever he has to make a really important decision and has time in which to do so, Rimmer makes a list; this is what he goes to do once she finishes laying down what few ground rules she’s already thought up and then goes off to her own quarters. He spends about five minutes picking just the right page in his notebook and the right pen, and then has to find a ruler to draw a line down the centre of the page and another one across the top to separate the headings out from the spot where he intends to put two neat bulleted lists, and he does all of this because when it gets to the part where he actually has to write something down he’s got no idea what to write.

He doesn’t want to lose her. He doesn’t want to share her with Lister. He doesn’t even want to think about the fact that she’s got any sort of history with any version of Lister. He doesn’t want to give up the sex, not now she’s started teaching him just how good it can be. It’s more that he doesn’t want to lose _her_; not just the sex but the way she gives him a _well, finally_ look when he demonstrates that he understands whatever navigating concept she’s been trying to explain, and the way she bites her lower lip when she’s trying not to look too proud of herself, and the way she blows her hair out of her face when she’s annoyed and it always falls right back.

The choice is between being definitely miserable without her, which doesn’t appeal to him at all, or having to share her with Lister, which is enough to make him fairly miserable anyway. At least she made it clear just before she went off to her own room and he went off to his that this isn’t a triangle so much as a V; she’s not expecting him and Lister to miraculously decide they like each other and complete the third side of the triangle. Thank _smeg_.

He doesn’t think he can handle the thought of being with her when he knows Lister’s been with her the night before. But the thought of not being with her at all is definitely worse.

He laughs out loud at himself, a dry, self-deprecating chuckle, as he realises all over again that he’s done the unthinkable and fallen in love with her.

There’s a knock at the door and his head snaps up; he’s hoping it’s her, even knowing it won’t be, even knowing that she’s ordered them to leave it until tomorrow, and sure enough it’s not her, it’s Lister.

‘Can I come in?’

‘What do you want?’

‘I think we should talk about this.’ He comes in without waiting for a yes and sits across the table from Rimmer, immediately picking up a spare pen and starting to fiddle with it. That’s one of the things about Lister; he can’t just sit still. He has to play with something, or hum, or click his tongue, or _do_ something all the time. Rimmer realises his own right leg is jiggling and smacks his hand down on his thigh to stop it.

‘Do you.’

Lister is so _fidgety_. His eyes look everywhere but at Rimmer’s face; no, they kind of meet his eyes once or twice, but it’s so briefly that it might as well be not at all. ‘Look. I know you’d rather not have to share her with me, but if the alternative is bein’ alone again, don’t you think we should at least try?’

Rimmer says nothing and apparently Lister has a problem with silences. ‘I know it’s weird, but...’

‘_Weird_, Lister. Weird is aliens sucking your face off and then using your abdomen as a latrine. This isn’t _weird_, it’s totally crazy.’

Lister shrugs, and this time _does_ meet his eyes. ‘So, it’s crazy. Does that mean we shouldn’t try it?’

He’s said it twice now. Rimmer can’t understand. He can’t understand why Lister hasn’t just marched in here, punched his lights out, and stuffed him headfirst into the nearest waste disposal unit, to be perfectly honest. Probably because that wouldn’t exactly endear him to Kochanski either.

‘Rimmer?’ Now he’s drumming the pen on the table; it sounds like a not terribly well constructed maraca.

‘All right, Lister, all right. You’re right; I don’t want to share. But... now I’ve been with her, I can understand why you’ve been pining after her for so long.’

Lister manages a smile. ‘I knew you’d work it out eventually. Just thought I’d come in here and make sure you weren’t goin’ totally mad.’

‘I’m not sure I _haven’t_,’ Rimmer says, reaching out and firmly taking the pen away from him.

Once Lister goes away again – and when he walks out of the room he’s _grinning_, not to mention humming to himself, as if the news that if he wants his girlfriend back he has to share is of no particular consequence – Rimmer starts running the whole thing over in his head again, trying to figure out exactly where he made the switch from Love Celibate to love-sick idiot.

He can’t work it out, and ends up falling asleep at the table, mind still going a million miles an hour.

* * *

The three of them reconvene in the Drive Room the next morning; the Cat, who’s been doing what passes for piloting considering that Holly’s doing most of the work for them now, seizes the opportunity to run off as soon as Kochanski enters, with naught but a yawned, ‘Hi, Captain Bud-babe,’ as he goes. She wonders just how long he’s been awake and how long he’s been napping in the centre chair letting Holly guide the ship, but then it’s the _Cat_; he’s only not in need of a nap when he’s eating.

Holly takes one look at her, goes red, and vanishes off screen.

‘Holly, come back.’

‘No.’ He’s obviously listening, just not immediately present.

‘Holly, do you really think I’m _that_ mad at you?’

‘...maybe?’

Kochanski sighs. ‘Look, Hol, there are about a hundred emotions on my list of to-feels ahead of being angry at you, if it’s any consolation.’

‘You made a _list_?’

Okay, so maybe being angry at him just jumped up a few places. ‘Not literally, Holly. I know this is a strange situation and frankly it’s not like there’s anything else to talk about on this ship unless you’re really fond of estimating gallons of water or working out how many vending machines are dispensing edible food. And that’s assuming you count Pot Noodles as “edible food”, which nobody does.’

‘It’s a hard-knock life, being Captain, I suppose.’

‘If you want to be useful, stop trying to be sympathetic and tell me where Dave and Arnold are.’

‘So it’s_ Arnold_ now?’

‘Holly, don’t think that just because I’ve got a navigation background I don’t know how to rewire a computer so it can’t leer.’

‘How do you know I’m leering?’

‘I can _hear_ it. Where are they?’

Turns out she didn’t really need to ask; even as she’s finishing the query she can hear their footsteps in the corridor outside the Drive Room. Arnold, who always sounds like he’s marching even when he’s not; Dave, who always sounds like if he went any slower he’d be going backwards. She can’t help but smile. _Not if you were the last man alive_, she’d told Dave the night he’d mistaken Caroline Carmen’s corpse for her, and at the time she’d meant it. Now they’re the last _two_ men left alive, and having watched the fleet behind them die, she’s no longer so ready to make such flippant remarks.

Then she remembers they haven’t actually said yes yet, and that’s enough to shut her brain up, at least temporarily. They both look like they’ve had restless nights and she’s thinking they can’t possibly agree to this madness.

They both pause in the doorway, glancing at each other, and she gets up because even if she’s still shorter than them standing up she at least feels a _little_ more in control of the situation if she can draw herself up to her full height, and cock an eyebrow at them, and say, ‘Well?’

Polar opposites in appearance and demeanour and dress, nonetheless they manage to move over to her in unison for once, and though she’s pretty sure they’d plot no such thing, the way Dave takes her left hand and Arnold takes her right seems almost choreographed. Arnold presses a courtly kiss to her knuckles; Dave just clings to her like a dreadlocked limpet.

‘Sorry, Kris,’ Arnold says, and for an awful second she’s positive it’s a no.

‘You’re stuck with both of us,’ Dave finishes, and the way he’s smiling means she leans in to kiss him first.

And naturally that’s when Kryten walks in. He’s carrying a duster, he’s got that three-seconds-from-an-explosion look on his face, and he squeaks, ‘Mr _Lister_, sir!’ in an outraged falsetto quite a bit higher than normal.

Dave pulls back. ‘Kryten...’

Whatever he’s about to offer up by way of trying to calm the mechanoid down is lost, because Kryten’s gaze has followed Kochanski’s other arm down to where her hand is firmly closed around Arnold’s and, like tomato ketchup on lobster, this is apparently so incompatible with his logic circuits that his head explodes.

There’s a long silence.

‘Oh dear,’ says Holly, finally popping back into view. ‘Can we fix that?’

‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ Dave says, letting go of Kochanski’s hand and moving to examine the mech.

‘Does he do this regularly?’Arnold asks, sneaking his arm around her waist now that Dave’s out of the way.

She kisses him quickly. ‘Only when he’s totally outraged.’

‘Can’t imagine why that would be,’ Holly comments; his pixelated eyes are darting from her to Arnold to Dave; from her to him to him to them.

‘I suppose that’s a one-person job then, Lister? Don’t need me and Kris around, do you?’

Kochanski disentangles herself from Arnold and sits back down in her chair. ‘Arnold, go and help him, that’s an order. The sooner Kryten’s back up and running the sooner we can have a proper breakfast.’

‘What’re you going to be doing?’

She sets her fingertip on the ENTER key of her console. ‘Taking us home.’


End file.
